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ORVILLE DEWEY BAKER 




."-5i..*, i.-^./^ir' 




Over against the great career of a judge upon the 
Bench, I would set for a moment the career within 
reach of a great lawyer at the Bar — self-respecting, and 
never servile, wise and conservative in counsel yet 
courageous in his convictions both as to law and fact, 
proud of winning his case yet not dismayed by tem- 
porary defeat, setting store by the books yet setting 
greater store by the power of original thinking and 
the luminous unfolding of legal principles which 
alone give value to the books, sullied by no taint of 
dishonor yet daring all things else in discharging 
his duty to his client, — all of us are jvistly proud 
to follow, eiiani longo intervallo, such an exalted ideal. 

OrvilIvR Dewey Baker. 



copy \o. 



2m 



These Addresses and Memorials 
being intended for private ciren- 
lation only, but §00 copies are 
printed ; and the type lias been 
distributed. 



ADDRESSES AND MEMORIALS 



ORVILLE DEWEY BAKER 



( 1 847-1908 ) 



Edited by 
M A N L E y H . PIKE 



AUGUSTA, MAINE 

THE KENNEBEC JOURNAL 
1909 



3\^ 



n5*i^tr 



90? 



CONTENTS 



I. Foreword 

II. Orville Dewey Bakkr 

III. Address on Development Before 

BOWDOIN Al,UMNI 

IV. Garfield Memorial Address 

V. Address at G. A. R. Encampment 

1890 

VI. Memorial Day Address, 1891 
VII. Blaine Memorial Address 
VIII. WiswELL Memorial Address 
IX. Address to the Maine Bar 
X. John A. PETERS — A Poem . 
XI. Editorial, Kennebec Journal 
XII. Editorial, Maine B'armer 

XIII. Editorial, Portland Press 

XIV. Memorial Services 



PAGE 
I 



21 
61 

67 

75 

lOI 

109 
125 
131 

135 
139 
147 



FOREWORD 

Orville Baker's oratorical activity extended 
over so long a period and so wide a range that it 
has been a matter of surprise to find how few of 
his speeches were preserved in print or manu- 
script. Of many of his best and most eloquent 
addresses not a word remains, save in the mem- 
ories of his hearers. Some were delivered before 
private citizens assembled socially, and were, 
consequently, not reported; while others have 
perished because they were never fully committed 
to paper. It was his practice, when considering 
a speech, to jot down a few notes — sometimes to 
write out short passages which he wished to 
make exact expressions of his thought — and then, 
having learned these by heart, to extemporize 
the rest of his oration, building it up around 
this framework as he proceeded. Thus it will 
be seen that what remains of these notes can 
convey no idea of the actual address ; and even 
the notes are few. 

Moreover, a large part of the surviving 
speeches, being concerned with special subjects, 
or intended for special audiences, were not 
adapted to general reading. 

From all these causes it has resulted that 
but seven of Orville Baker's addresses have 
been found available for the present purpose ; 



and four of these existed only in newspaper 
reports. Fortunately, however, the grand poem 
in memory of Chief Justice Peters had been 
privately printed. It remains an evidence of a 
lofty poetical power which for some reason the 
possessor had seldom cared to exercise. 

The remainder of the volume is made up of a 
study of Orville Baker's character and attain- 
ments, together with the eulogies and more 
notable obituaries of his brother lawyers and the 
press. In the study just mentioned, the descrip- 
tion of Baker as a student is the contribution of 
Hon. D. S. Alexander of Buffalo, N. Y. (Bow- 
doin, '70); ^nd the appreciation of his abilities 
as a lawyer is by Hon. Herbert M. Heath of 
Augusta (Bowdoin, '72). 

The editorials appearing in the Kennebec 
Journal, the Portland Press and the Maine 
Farmer are understood to be the work of Mr. 
C. B. Burleigh, Mr. Frederick Fay and Mr. S. C. 
Manley, respectively. 

M. H. P. 
Augusta, Maine, January i, 1909. 



ORVILLE DEWEY BAKER 



He was counsel for the Maine Central and Boston 
& Maine Railroads, Western Union Telegraph 
Company, American Ice Company, Edwards 
Manufacturing Company, Hallowell Granite 
Works, the estate of J. Manchester Haynes and 
in the extensive timber land litigations of the 
Coburn heirs. At the time of his death he was 
President of the Maine Bar Association. 

Mr. Baker was unmarried. His surviving 
relatives are Frances W. Rice of Rockland, 
Ellen B. Buck of Atlanta, Ga., Anna S. Ham of 
Hallowell, Sanford A. Baker of Chicago, Martha 
B. Dunn of Waterville, Harriet B. Dudley of 
Augusta, Henry B. Lewis of China, Maine, 
Delia L. Giddings of Boston, Mass., and Eliza- 
beth R. Huntington of Norwich, Conn. 



In college Orville D. Baker was an ideal 
student — tall, graceful, handsome, faultlessly 
dressed, joyous in disposition, and easily the first 
scholar in his class. As a fraternity man 
( D K E ) he was also ideal, being a fine singer, 
a forceful debater, a brilliant writer, and a most 
charming, even-tempered companion. He seemed 
to excel in everything both in and out of doors. 
He was the finest baseball player, the crack 
billiardist, the best jumper, the fastest runner, 
and the most expert at ten pins. In baseball he 
had the skilfulness of a professional. His posi- 
tion was first base, and it took a wild ball to 
escape his long reach. Whatever the pressure 
he never failed to do his best. In the historic 
game with the Eons of Portland, when the 
Bowdoins won the silver ball in the fall of 1 867, 
he shared first honors with Frank Ring (class of 
'69), the catcher. Indeed, Baker possessed all 
the essentials that make up a most popular man 
in college. He had a clean tongue. He exhib- 
ited an abundance of the ironical or pungent 
banter, which characterized his later life, but 
there was nothing low in his conversation, and he 
had no enemies. Among the young ladies of 
Brunswick he was equally a favorite. He danced 
properly, dropped a graceful compliment with 
sureness of aim, and never failed to make a 
chivalrous beau. Yet his attentions were evenly 



distributed. He had already entered the incip- 
ient stage of bachelorhood. 

His relations with the Faculty did not differ 
from those of other students. They admired 
his pleasing manners, his unusual brightness and 
readiness in recitation, and his quickness to com- 
prehend abstruse propositions, but his obser\^ance 
of college proprieties did not distinguish him any 
more than strenuous industry in the beaten paths 
of academic routine. He was desultory and ex- 
cursive, roaming at large over the varied heights 
that tempted his curiosity. Fortunately his 
great gifts enabled him to get his lessons quickly, 
giving him much time in the libraries. As the 
dawn of intelligence lighted the way he gave 
those assembled at the Fraternity dinner table 
bewitching visions of the realms thus explored. 
He anticipated by several years the Andover 
dispute as to the ultimate fate of those who never 
heard the saving name of Christ. Nevertheless, 
he allowed nothing to stand in the way of success 
in his regular studies. He took all of the then 
existing prizes — Sophomore and Junior declama- 
tion, and English composition. He became class 
orator, a Phi Beta Kappa, and an oration man at 
Commencement, and in 1871 delivered the Mas- 
ter's Oration. He was a student to be proud of. 
He gave character to the College, to his class, 
and to his fraternity. There was a manly dignity 
about him that seemed never to be out of sight. 

His splendid address delivered at Commence- 
ment, 1908 — the fortieth anniversary of his 

8 



graduation — recalled his college speeches. His 
charm was felt the moment he rose. His voice, 
musical as a flute, yielded without effort the 
happy inflections suited to the thought, while 
his love of form kept him insensibly under the 
influence of the best diction. 

Like all college boys he had his moods. One 
week it would be a mood of grace ; at another 
time he would exhibit a sort of bombastic irony, 
or brilliant, audacious banter, a trifle extravagant 
perhaps, but full of the love of scholarship. He 
was largely instrumental in establishing at Bow- 
doin the " '68 prize" for excellence in composition, 
the credit for which lies not so much in giving 
the money as in the fact that a class of young 
men, on the day of their graduation, showed 
such a high appreciation of the need of thorough 
training for public speaking. Baker's idea was 
that a college man should be able always to 
express his thoughts clearly and forcibly, and 
while in college he set a high standard. 

His crisp, pointed, and delightful college essays, 
could they be assembled, would make a fasci- 
nating chapter. A pleasant flavor of sarcasm 
would be found by the side of many passages 
that breathe the highest eloquence. Perhaps 
the too constant exercise of irony made some- 
times a confusion as to whether he was writing 
or speaking seriously, but he never wittingly 
trod on a secret corn. He was too humane for 
that. Besides, he was without base or unpar- 
donable faults. 



But the qualities which made him eminently 
lovable and winning were his lack of jealousy 
and the absence of an offensive egotism. In so 
ardent a nature these are a real mark of superior- 
ity. Perhaps he might have developed jealousy 
had a greater than he been in his class or in his 
fraternity, for the ambitious man is rare who can 
watch without soreness the success of a rival. 
But Baker had no rivals. He \\?i^ facile princeps. 



lo 



As a lawyer Mr. Baker has left a name and 
reputation that comes to but few men in any 
state. He had the best of training. His mind 
was enriched by the ripe scholarship that came 
from his four well-spent years at Bowdoin. 
There he was a close student, his standing pro- 
phetic of his future ability. Travel and study 
in Europe broadened his mind early in youth. 
He fitted for the bar at Harvard Law School, 
showing even then a masterly grasp of the law 
as a philosophical science. He came to the Bar 
in 1872 in partnership with his father, Joseph 
Baker, then the acknowledged leader of the Bar 
of Maine. The son grew rapidly, not because of 
his father's standing but from his own power. 
He early became known as a trial lawyer. There 
he was at his best. His rise was rapid and in 
many respects remarkable. It is unnecessary to 
recount the many notable cases in which he 
appeared in this and other states. During the 
past twenty-five years there have been but few 
great cases in Maine in which he did not take 
part. Perhaps the famous Stain and Cromwell 
case will be the longest remembered. No man 
in Maine of the present generation excelled him. 
Leading lawyers have said he had no superiors 
in New England. 

In direct examination he built the story of the 
cause with the touch of a novelist. In cross 



examination he had his greatest weapon. There 
his fertility of resource carried his mind along 
from point to point with a skill pleasing to all 
but his opponents. In advocacy he was aggres- 
sive, courageous, logical; and, when the occasion 
required it, eloquent. But in the Law Court, in 
battling for new propositions of law, it is no 
reflection upon his fellow-members of the Bar to 
say he had no equals. So great was his concep- 
tion of legal principles, so accurate was his idea 
of their relations one with another, so finely 
analytical was the keenness of his logical mind, 
that in his hands the common law expanded with 
society and equity took on new shape. He did 
much for the science he so dearly loved. 

He was never a politician, with little or no 
ambition for public office. He served his State 
as attorney general and honored the office. 
Beyond that, he was content to follow his 
profession. Still, he was a close student of 
public affairs, strongly conservative and as firm 
in his convictions upon public questions as he 
was aggressive in asserting them. 

He could well be called an orator, a much- 
abused term in modern times when all talkers are 
called orators. Graceful in manner, of attractive 
address, with a pleasing, well modulated voice, 
he brought to his work all the externals of true 
oratory. His diction was rich, at times a prose- 
poem. But word-painter as he was, he never 
forgot that the real work of an orator is to 
convince. The juries, judges, legislatures and 



audiences that have Hstened to him will all bear 
witness that he more often convinced than lost. 
He certainly was an orator, a true orator, of 
whom his city and his State have been and will 
be justly proud. 

He won his fame as a scholar, a lawyer, an 
advocate and an orator, partly by inborn genius, 
partly by opportunities vigorously grasped, but 
mainly by untiring industry. His capacity for 
concentration was a gift. Few men could so 
readily absorb a new and difficult problem as he. 
Often apparently whipped in a cause, he would 
reform his lines and come to the attack with a 
courage that snatched victory out of the jaws 
of defeat. When he worked he worked. He 
believed that work was the price of all success. 
The royal English that often entranced his 
hearers was not always born of a night, but 
was more often the harvest of years of study 
and of toil. Such men deserve the fame they 
leave. Orville D. Baker will go down the history 
of this State as a man great in whatever he 
undertook in life because he deserved to be 
great. We know that after death eulogy is apt 
to take on the garb of fulsomeness. But his 
rivals said of him living what we now say of him 
dead. They studied him to measure him. They 
had to study him to meet him. We but repeat 
the tributes often given him in the fulness of 
his strength, tributes from lawyers to lawyer, 
foes in the court-room, friends outside. 



13 



In private life Mr. Baker was as remarkable 
as in his public activities — partly because of the 
continued operation of the same faculties which 
won him success at the bar and on the platform ; 
and partly in that he revealed a character quite 
unknown and unrealized by the outside world. 
The nature of the man was essentially social — 
there was nothing of the recluse about him. 
The abounding vigor and mental alertness that 
made him a great lawyer and orator made him 
also a delightful talker and charming companion, 
whether in the ball room, at the dinner table, in 
his own library, or out of doors. He knew or 
had known so many and so various people — had 
been so much a partaker of his time — had ac- 
quired so wide and deep a knowledge of humanit)' 
that he could never be nonplussed nor at a loss, 
in whatever society he might find himself. He 
met the highest and the wisest on even terms ; 
but he was just as much at ease with the casual 
wayfarer encountered on the highway, or the 
little child who smiled up at him as he passed. 
He could bear even that hardest of hard tests — 
all day association with the same persons in the 
same house — without a single failure of tact or 
temper, always cheerful, always cheering, always 
kind and ready to amuse, or to be amused. He 
was a man who would take as much trouble to 
entertain another man, quite indifferent to him, 

14 



as he would take to please a beautiful girl — 
and beyond this courtesy does not and can- 
not go. 

He possessed both wit and humor; he had the 
skill of quick repartee along with that of good- 
natured but keenly effective sarcasm, and a 
peculiarly amusing narrative style, full of queer 
and unusual turns of thought and quaint origi- 
nalities of language. To hear some important 
law case described by him with this light face- 
tiousness of touch, as if he had found the trying 
of it — and the winning of it — but the merest 
pastime, was to have new light upon the careless 
strength of the strong. 

Mr. Baker read little of general literature dur- 
ing his later years ; but his mind was so stocked 
with the results of immense reading in his youth, 
stored up and held always ready for use in that 
wonderful memory of his which never forgot and 
never misrecollected — that he was invariably 
prepared for any call upon him. He belonged 
to that small band of American college graduates 
for whom the best Greek and Latin authors still 
remain a permanent influence and a living force ; 
nor can any one who listened to the plea for the 
classics which he made at Bowdoin last June 
soon forget either it or him. He was familiar, 
too, with the best achievements of art, and he 
had been for years an intelligent and enthusiastic 
collector of old glass and china, oriental rugs and 
colonial furniture. He loved music and had 
heard much of the best of it. 

15 



Having to a surprising extent the gift of 
throwing business off his mind whenever he 
wished, he could go out from a day of the sever- 
est kind of office-work, or from a fiercely-fought 
case in court, to a game of tennis, or a ramble in 
the fields ; either of which he would enjoy with 
the single-hearted zest of a child. This precious 
power he owed very largely to his singular 
strength of mind and body. Once, after a seven- 
hour speech, delivered without notes, though full 
of facts and figures, he was asked if he were not 
tired. " Yes, tired of standing in one place so 
long," he answered, quite sincerely. He posi- 
tively did not feel drains upon his vitality which 
would have prostrated weaker men. Weights 
were gossamer to him which were lead to others. 

He constantly showed that almost infallible 
sign of greatness — the power of being pleased 
with simple things. He liked to stroll through 
the woods or along the roads he had known all 
his life, watching the birds of which he made a 
special study, observing the shifting effects of 
light and shade, the color of the sky, the fickle 
forms of the changing clouds and the scarlet 
splendors of the sunset. On some rocky hill- 
top, or under a forest tree he could sit long and 
happily, talking and looking about him. His 
interest in flowers and all growing things was a 
part of this habit of mind. 

He loved animals as few love them ; and he 
received from them the reward of the loving — 
love. His fondness for cats, of which he seldom 

i6 



had less than seven or eight about the house, 
used to be a standing jest among his acquain- 
tances ; and his dogs were his brothers. Wher- 
ever he went he made all beasts his friends ; and 
he would boast laughingly that he knew every 
cat, dog and baby for miles out along certain 
roads from Augusta. 

For children loved and trusted him, too. 
There are many of them who will miss the tall, 
white haired man who petted them and joked 
them and knew them by their names. 

It was so that he went about his world, 
cordial and friendly, full of banter and laugh- 
ter, standing not at all on the dignity none 
could better assume when it was needed — 
betraying not at all any consciousness of being, 
as he was, the intellectual superior of almost 
every one he met — a jovial giant, joyous as a 
schoolboy. Yes, as a schoolboy. For this legal 
athlete, this surpassing advocate, this mighty 
man of business, kept hidden underneath all his 
learning, all his culture, all his accumulated 
immensity of experience, the honest heart of a 
boy, fond of the things of earth and air and sky 
and sea as a boy is fond of them, and able to 
taste, as a boy tastes, the fresh flavors of that 
evening and that morning which are ever the 
first day of creation while boyhood lasts. 

Not many knew him thus — but thus those 
who knew him knew the real, the best Orville 
Baker ; and, having thus known him, they can 

17 



never without a thought of their lost comrade 
look out at all he used to look at once, but will 
never look at with them any more. 



i8 



ADDRESSES 



IS ALL DEVELOPMENT IN NATURE, 

LIFE, MIND, AND SOCIETY, 

RHYTHMIC AND PERIODIC? 

Address before the Aliunni of Bozvdoin College 

A distinguishing characteristic of modern 
thought has been the growing sense of the uni- 
versaHty of law. That every phenomenon of 
nature takes place in obedience to a pre-estab- 
lished and invariable order, and not at the caprice 
of a pleased or angry god, is a conception so 
refined that it fellowships only with a high civili- 
zation and great powers of analysis. To the 
ancients the flat earth, the circumfluous ocean 
and the all embracing air were alike but the 
dwelling place of mystery, and the sport of 
antagonistic and unreasoning gods. Earth must 
be propitiated by gifts lest she refuse her fruits 
in their seasons, else blight and mildew, drought 
and storm would bring to nought the labors of 
the husbandman. By the frown or favor of 
Neptune the waves roughened or grew calm, and 
he whipped the winds from their storm-caves to 
minister to the whims of his malice ; while Juno 
and Venus, wife and mistress of Jove, embroiled 
Olympus itself with their strife over the fate of 
the pious Eneas. 

The moon and stars, as they whirled through 



space, were supposed driven by unseen powers, 
or else as fixed in spheres of solid but trans- 
parent crystal, turning forever round the sta- 
tionary earth. When Jove the thunderer knit 
his brows, the sky wrapped itself with blackness, 
and with a noise as of chariots and horsemen the 
storm-spirit walked abroad. Comets blazed 
across the sky, eclipse ate up the glory of the 
sun, stars quit their spheres and went out in 
mid air like candles too quickly snuffed, — all 
only to portend calamity to the sons of men. 
The pestilence that walketh in darkness, the war 
that wasteth at noon day, and the famine that 
hungereth but is not satisfied, were all visita- 
tions of a god that waited to be appeased. 

The commonest events of life required the 
presence, or were explained on the theory of, the 
supernatural. The rosy Hours unbarred the 
gates of the morning, Phoebus guided the chariot 
of day, Hesperus, the love star, foretold the 
sweet coming of night; Satyrs and Dryads, 
Nymphs and Sylvan Fauns sported in the woods 
and beside the waters; Bacchus in person led 
the revels of the vine}ard, Priapus was god of 
the orchard and the garden, while every fountain, 
grove and river had its peculiar deity, and with 
equal reverence Eneas bore from smoking Troy 
the aged Anchises and the household gods. 
Lucina presided over birth; Mars trained the 
growing youth in arms; Apollo nourished him 
with poetry and the arts. Mercury gave nimble 
and persuasive speech ; Diana held up the mirror 



of chastity, Minerva proffered the apples of 
wisdom, Venus wooed to langour and to love; 
while over all, superior to Jove himself, at the 
foot of Pluto's ebony throne, sat the solemn 
sister-Fates with the distaff, the spindle and the 
shears, spinning in silence and mystery the 
thread of life ; and death itself must wait till 
Atropos applied the fatal shears. At death 
Charon, with his skiff and freight of shadows, 
waited to ferry the souls across the Styx to the 
pale realms of the dead, and there, among its 
unsubstantial and flitting forms, were the legion 
that attended the living man ; Care and Sorrow 
and Disease, meagre Want, sullen Remorse, 
thirsty Fever, scowling Hate and muttering 
Revenge, Fear that starts at its own voice, and 
Jealousy making of ''trifles light as air confirma- 
tions strong as proofs of holy writ." Only after 
long probation was the vexed shade admitted to 
the bland air and immortal bloom of the Elysian 
fields. 

Such was the ancient conception of the 
universe ; the sky a bewildering mass of lights 
of differing brilliancy, moved about from place to 
place as lanterns are carried in the dim heights 
of a belfry; some constant, some waxing and 
waning in periods, some at rest, some in motion ; 
Nature a congeries of disjointed phenomena, 
coming none knew whence or how, moving none 
knew whither, intricate, capricious, orderless. 
The first step towards scientific knowledge was 
taken when men passed from the anomalies, to 

23 



observe the uniformities, of nature. The un- 
trained mind is moved by the irregularly vast : 
as the earthquake, the volcano, the comet, the 
meteor. The trained mind is moved by the 
regularly vast : as systems of stars held together 
by the single law of gravitation. 

Phenomena now began to be grouped and 
classified. Like effects were referred to like 
causes. Certain sequences of events were ob- 
served to be invariable, and the number and 
variety of these were constantly extending. A 
patient study of nature revealed real harmony 
underlying apparent discord, and unity in the 
midst of diversity. Copernicus established the 
fixity of the earth and the revolution of the sun. 
Galileo and Tycho Brahe reinforced him by their 
powerful genius. Kepler discovered the laws of 
planetary motion. Newton unified the whole by 
the great principle of gravitation, and astronomy 
was forever freed from superstition and fixed on 
the basis of law. H alley proved the parabola of 
the comets, and those wandering flames were 
added to the conquests of law. Dalton con- 
ceived the law of definite, multiple and equiva- 
lent proportions, and chemistry has since stood 
side by side with astronomy. The famous 
vortices of Descartes led the way to Herschel, 
Kant, La Place and the Nebular Hypothesis. 
This was the precursor of modern evolution, and 
then for the first time was conceived the grand 
possibility of a universe evolved from matter and 
force by the operation of law, which is but the 
24 



expression of the Divine will. The subjection 
of one science to law suggested, and made easier, 
the subjection of the next. If there was a law 
for the planets, why not for the comets and 
meteors ? If there could be a universology for 
the heavens, why not a geology for the earth.'' 
If the currents of the sea could be tracked and 
foretold, why not the currents of the air, the 
wind, weather, storms ? If there was an order 
of development in rocks and hills why not in 
plants and trees.' If in the mineral and vegeta- 
ble, why not in the animal world.? 

Thus knowledge advanced. Nature opened 
to science as the snow-drop to the sun, and 
Fetischism and Polytheism were displaced by 
the conception of a majestic and universal order, 
creating, fashioning, disposing, upholding all by 
immutable laws. 

But the empire of law was as yet thought 
limited to nature. Her forces were constant 
and inexhaustible. The untold ages that had 
passed had neither lessened nor augmented the 
sum total of their energies. Their form shifted, 
their quantity never. With the same amount of 
force to work with, nature has ever the same 
substance, matter, to work on. Above all, 
nature does no thinking. It has no will, no 
choice. It does the work of another, and does 
it according to his law. The stone, the flower 
have no volition. They have but one thing to 
do, and they do that till they die. The animal 
can change its place, and within limits its state. 

25 



If uncomfortable in one position it can move. 
If tired of the sun it seeks the shade ; if hungry 
it eats; if exhausted, sleeps; if hot, it stands in 
the brook. But this it does, not from intelligent 
choice, but overmastering instinct. It sees and 
hears and feels, but it does not think or choose. 
The stone is hard, the flower sweet, the tree 
tapers, the sun shines, the cow grazes, the kitten 
plays, not because they will to do so, but 
because they cannot help it. They are in the 
hands of a master, and have no power to do 
otherwise. But the region of the unthinking 
and non-volitioned seemed to mark the natural 
bounds of law, as mountain chains the bounds 
of countries. The very nature of law seems 
thus to circumscribe its own dominion. Like 
nature, law neither thinks nor spares, and acts 
by necessity, not from choice. It is hard, relent- 
less, inexorable as fate. It visits without mercy 
the consequences of disobedience and wrong 
doing. It respects no place or person. It 
punishes neglect of physical law with pain and 
sickness and death, it does the same with mental 
and moral law. It shrivels and withers the 
unused ; it makes of the abused a passion that 
overmasters. It is, by turns, swift, sure and 
deadly like the lightning, and slow moving, 
relentless and awful like a Fate. It considers 
no motive, it listens to no excuse or apology. 
It condemns alike those who innocently trans- 
gress and those who intentionally violate. Past 
obedience or services are no atonement. Its 

26 



ears are stopped, its mouth is dumb, its heart is 
stone, but it sees with unsleeping eyes, and 
strikes with remorseless and omnipotent hand. 
Cold, passionless, omnipresent, unescapable, it 
preserves by necessity, and crushes with a sneer. 
It supports innumerable stars that they clash 
not one with another, but it hurls men from 
buildings, drags them down precipices, crushes 
them wdth weights, drowns them in the sea. It 
sends the gentle wind from heaven, but it lashes 
the tornado into fury, and puts fangs in the jaws 
of the pestilence. It packs away sunlight in the 
chambers of the coal, but lets it out to lap 
up great cities with conflagration, to leave men 
homeless and women crying. It tempts the 
seed with sunshine and dew, but it mildews the 
wheat and lodges the bladed corn. 

But man stands on a different plane. All 
things else have been made for him, and to some 
e.xtent he controls them. He alone has intelli- 
gent choice. He not only feels and moves, he 
thinks and wills. He can adapt means to ends. 
Of two courses of conduct he can choose the 
one or the other, with reference either to imme- 
diate or remoter good. He can succumb to 
instinct or appetite and be a brute, or trample 
both and be a god. He can live only for the 
day, like the butterfly, or for eternity like Plato 
and Apelles. He is fastened to no orbit as are 
the stars, and limited to no career as is the 
brute ; he has time to work in, and eternity to 
work for. Withal he is so capricious as to be a 

27 



puzzle to himself. He does today, what he 
despises tomorrow, and chases with outstretched 
arms tomorrow the bauble he threw away today, 
while the truth, which in one age he rejects and 
persecutes, in the next shines apparent before 
him, indispensable, like the sun. 

Is it surprising, then, that the acts of this free, 
volitioned, capricious being should long have 
been deemed the solitary exception to the law of 
order. It was reserved for the nineteenth century 
and for Auguste Comte to conceive and develop 
the luminous idea that there was a law and regu- 
lar sequence in the history of opinion and the 
development of society; and that if man the 
individual, comparing brief periods of time, 
seems unstable as water, man the aggregate, 
comparing longer periods, moves, acts and even 
thinks in well defined lines of development, the 
laws of which under a wider induction may some- 
time be as accurately mapped out as the laws of 
light, heat or falling bodies. Indeed the seem- 
ing capriciousness and disorder which marks the 
ways of man is only a counterpart of that which 
we have already seen in nature. The cyclone, 
the earthquake, the avalanche, the plague, are as 
unaccountable as they are baleful, and smite 
without plan as without warning. Now they are 
scattered broadcast over a hemisphere, now 
heaped in accumulated ruin on a single district ; 
now separated by wide intervals of prosperity; 
now trampling one on another like phrenzied 
men that fiee from falling walls. Thus to the 

28 



unphilosophic mind nature spreads out a scene 
of boundless and unmitigated disorder. Even 
Stuart Mill in his posthumous Essays on Reli- 
gion makes this the climax of his terrific arraign- 
ment of nature. To borrow his words: "Even 
the love of order which is thought to be a 
following of the ways of nature is in fact a 
contradiction of them. All which people are 
accustomed to deprecate as 'disorder' and its con- 
sequences is precisely a counterpart of nature's 
ways. Anarchy and the Reign of Terror are 
overmatched in injustice, ruin and death by a 
hurricane and a pestilence." That this is the 
surface view few will deny, and it is only when 
deeply considered that nature offers the specta- 
cle we have contemplated, of a universe set in 
order. 

If then the anarchy of nature resolved itself 
into law, and all its discord was "harmony not 
understood," why might it not be the same with 
mind. Thus Comte, applying his brilliant and 
philosophic genius to the history of the human 
mind, read there an orderly progress and growth, 
from the day when it first groped after a wider 
knowledge, an infant crying in the night, till 
now, when it plays unabashed with the Titian 
forces of nature, and knocks loudly at the doors 
of the Infinite. 

Herein lay the greatness of Comte as a 
thinker, that he saw clearly the fact of such a 
progress, not that he mapped out its true order 
of development. To bind together this and all 

29 



other development, physical, mental, social and 
cosmical, into the sheaf of evolution and then to 
track and more nearly formulate its laws, was 
reserved for the encyclopedic knowledge and 
more universal genius of Mr. Spencer. To use 
the just and fine illustration of a later developer 
of evolution, Mr. Fiske, "modern philosophy 
may look to Comte for its Copernicus, but to 
another for its Kepler and Newton." 

A notion rapidly took shape that this progress, 
whatever it was, and whether towards better or 
worse, was at least uniform and uninterrupted. 
Some few read in history a uniform retrogres- 
sion. Vico saw in it a single, vast, ever recurring 
cycle, like the path of a planet, in which the 
human mind, having advanced to the extreme 
verge of its orbit, returns upon itself and begins 
once more its dreary round ; but by far the 
greater number saw in the human mind an 
inherent and necessary tendency towards perfec- 
tion, which would not be stayed or interrupted, 
but, with unresting energy, moved towards its 
goal by constant and solid increments of 
progress. 

Whatever, then, the goal of progress, the 
theory of its uninterruptedness has thus be- 
come firmly fixed, and is probably acted on by 
the great proportion even of cultivated minds. 
It will be the business of this discussion to 
examine the truth of this theory. 

Is all devi'lopjiient, in nature, life, mind, and 



30 



society, this constant, or is it rhythmic, recurrent, 
oscillating, yet progressive ? 

A mountain side, seen from a distance and in 
front, seems a regular and unbroken slope ; in 
reality it rises by a thousand fluctuating ascents 
and descents and discouraging stretches of level. 
A ship steers for a distant port, but it will be by 
a series of tackings. Light travels from the sun 
earthward not in a direct line, but by undula- 
tions. The advancing tide is made up of waves, 
each of which advances and recedes with an 
alternating rhythm of its own, and the highest 
point touched by one may long mark the limit 
of advance ; but by and by it will be overlapped, 
and swept from sight, by a successor; yet all 
the while, in rest or in advance, the tide is com- 
ing in. Such is the movement of mind, at once 
rhythmic and progressive. Vico, indeed, by his 
famous cyclic theory gave to the mind's develop- 
ment rhythm, but denied it progress. His 
rhythm was a swing from nothingness back to 
nothingness ; not the progressive rhythm of the 
tide, but the vain rising and sinking of a wave 
far out at sea. 

The purpose of this examination will be to 
suggest and briefly illustrate the principle, that 
the progress of nature, life, mind and society 
has not been steady and uninterrupted, but by 
irregular propulsions, with intervals of rest and 
even retrogression; that it moves not contin- 
uously but by undulations; that, if direct at all, 
it is only as an imaginary mean between two 

31 



real and ever shifting extremes of oscillation ; 
that you cannot lay your hand on it at any point 
indifferently, and find it tremulous with an un- 
resting advance; that therefore halts or breaks 
or retrogressions not only do not disprove an 
inherent tendency towards betterment, but do 
not even mar its plan, being but phases of a 
little noted law of mental, as well as physical, 
movement, viz : progression by rhythmic alter- 
nations and periods, like the tides. 

We shall examine the evidences of the exist- 
ence of such a law : 

First : In the analysis of nature and life. 

Second : In the action of the individual mind. 

Third : In the movement of society. 

Spencer's profound thought first generalized 
into a law of nature the fact that motion 
never takes place in right lines, but in undu- 
lations, backward and forward movements, as 
the sea when moved is thrown into waves ; 
that all motion has its periodic rise and fall, 
making up what he aptly calls the Rhythm of 
Motion, as the harmonic rise and fall of stress 
and pitch make up the rhythm of verse. 

In nature — to begin with the commonest 
things — the progress of the year is accomplished 
not by perpetual summer or winter, nor by a 
constant progression from heat to cold or cold to 
heat, but by the ceaseless alternation of one with 
the other, forming the familiar and proportioned 
cadence of the seasons. So the advance of time 
from season to season is by successive undula- 

32 



tions of day and night, light and darkness. So 
a single day, from "morn to noon, from noon to 
dewy eve" and back again to morning, has a 
graduated and harmonic rise and fall, like a 
wave, whose perfect proportion is only unnoticed 
because familiar. 

So the progress from one season to the ne.xt is 
not persistent, but intermittent, with stationary 
days and sudden pushings forward. Summer 
revives in the brief gold of October, and spring, 
which today turns away her face, coy like a 
maiden that is wooed, tomorrow decks herself 
with apple blossoms and daffodils, and runs to 
court the summer, like a bride that is wed. So 
there is not only the rhythmic increase and 
decrease in the length of the days from Decem- 
ber to June and from June back to December, 
but the daily rate of change has a tidal rhythm 
of its own, the days lengthening or shortening 
faster and faster as they near the Equinoxes, 
more and more slowly as they near the Solstices, 
and halting at June and December almost with- 
out change. So the great currents of air, which 
form the circulation of the globe, move to and 
fro like a mighty pendulum, rising from the 
torrid regions of the equator, flowing out to 
either pole through the upper air, then swinging 
back as an under-current to the equator. The 
currents of the sea, moving from the equator 
to the poles overhead, with return flow under- 
neath from the poles to the equator, obey the 
same law of slow, unresting rhythm, and the ice- 

33 



berg and the ship, left to themselves, go floating 
opposite ways, for the ship takes the current of 
the surface, while the iceberg is moved by the 
great polar underflow. The Gulf Stream curves 
its eastern arm round the shores of Great Britain 
and Spain ; its companion of the Pacific does the 
same for China and Japan, then each returns on 
itself in a closed and rhythmic circuit, like the 
path of a star ; while along these vast circuits of 
rhythm, the air, like the water, is propelled in 
wave-like undulations. The trees, the tall grass, 
poppies, corn sway in the wind, the storm has 
its lulls and its moments of fury, because the 
force that impels them all is not constant, but 
intermittent and rhythmic. The rain does not 
fall all day with a monotone of sound, but beats 
fiercely, dies down, and swells again. 

The disturbances of nature, like its harmonies, 
obey the same law of periodicity and rhythm. 
The fires of the Aurora come in pulsations ; 
electricity, the earthquake, the volcano propa- 
gate in shocks, alternating with periods of rest. 
Thunder comes in recurrent crashes, gathering 
and recoiling, and each shock is rhythmical in 
itself with gradual swell and subsidence. 

The famous voyage of the ship " Challenger" 
revealed many beautiful and striking confirma- 
tions of this law of rhythm. 

The relative gathering of clouds is found, 
when studied under a sufficiently long observa- 
tion, to follow this same law of alternation, 
exhibiting daily a double periodicity, having its 

34 



first maximum in the morning, lasting till shortly- 
after the sun has risen, followed by a minimum 
till noon, then rising to a second maximum at 
about 4 P. M., and dropping to its final minimum 
from sunset to midnight. 

So there is a similar average undulation in the 
amount of hourly rainfall, which can be calcu- 
lated for each differing locality, and which, like 
the rest, is symmetrical in its wave-like movement 
from maximum to minimum. At Philadelphia, 
for instance, 6 P. M. marks the average maxi- 
mum, and 3 A. M. the average minimum, while 
at Vienna each summer day shows three distinct 
maxima and minima. 

The longer alternations of wet and rainless 
seasons in many climates is familiar, and from 
observations made by Prof. Draper at the 
Central Park observatory it seems probable that 
still slower cycles exist, for different localities, 
of excess and deficiency in rainfall, cycles requir- 
ing four or more years for their completion, and 
each one oscillating with a pulsating progress 
about an established mean. 

So even the wandering wind, the poet's 
symbol for the unstable, no longer "bloweth 
where it listeth," in the sense of being held to 
no law, but is found to follow a defined and 
rhythmic wave of velocity, having its minimum 
in the hours between midnight and four A. M., 
and then gradually rising with the sun till it 
finds its maximum of force from midday to two 
P. M. Not only this, but we find that the 

35 



wind's rate of change from rest to violence and 
back again to rest is not constant, but fluctua- 
ting, remaining nearly stationary from ten P. M., 
to nine A. M., and then increasing from nine A. 
M. to six P. M., sweeping up, and then down, 
its wave-like course with great rapidity. 

In nearly all climates near seas or large sheets 
of water, there is, coupled with the previous 
rhythm of swell and subsidence, a daily periodic- 
ity even to the direction of the wind, setting in 
from the sea in the morning, rising in velocity 
with the sun, dying away towards evening, to be 
followed by a breeze from the land, which in 
turn stiffens through the night, and sinks to rest 
in the morning. 

So thunder-storms have a progressive fre- 
quency of occurrence at different hours of the 
day, dependent somewhat on the locality, the 
average of which marks for each locality its own 
peculiar and permanent curve of undulation. 

In like manner whirlwinds, water-spouts, tor- 
nadoes, have a marked rhythm of waxing and 
waning frequency at different hours, correspond- 
ing generally with the maxima and minima of 
temperature, wind-velocity, and thunder-storms, 
being least in number between ten P. M., and 
ten A. M., then rapidly increasing, till, between 
two P. M. and six P. M., occurred almost two- 
thirds of the one hundred and sixty-two observed. 

It is now known that storms travel in definite 
paths, and it is a curious fact, the subject of a 
paper by Prof. Loomis, that the progress or 

36 



velocity of a storm path is not uniform through- 
out the day but advances by paroxysms, having 
its highest velocity from four o'clock lo eleven 
at night and reaching its maximum at eight. 

If we pass for a moment from the external, to 
the internal, movements of nature, as science 
reveals them to us, to those atomic forces whose 
incessant and tremendous energies underlie the 
world of appearance, we are met by the same 
law. Sound, heat, light, electricity, chemism, 
the great highways by which matter passes into 
the cognizance of mind, are all only atomic 
waves, and differ only in the rapidity of their 
vibrations. And curious science, prying into the 
very constitution of matter, resolves it into 
groups of ultimate atoms, round, indivisible, 
indestructible, never packed so closely that they 
are not surrounded by space, approaching and 
receding, but never touching ; and these atoms 
swing incessantly backward and forward through 
infinitesimal orbits, with a motion as perpetual 
as that of the earth or sun. 

And, passing at a bound from the world of 
atoms to the world of suns, if we set out among 
the stars, and journey from system to system? 
even to those whose dim and far-off suns glimmer 
feebly into our most powerful telescopes, there 
is no known sun or planet which does not swing 
in rhythm, and whose motion does not rhythmi- 
cally slacken towards the greater axis, and accel- 
erate towards the lesser axis, of its orbit. 

The brave patience of the German Schwabe, 

37 



who, in forty six years missed but a single obser- 
vation and that through illness, revealed the fact 
that the much feared eruptions through the solar 
envelope which we call sun spots, and whose 
yawning gulfs are hundreds of miles from brink 
to brink, obey this same law of periodicity ; 
appear and disappear, wax and wane in frequency, 
with a fluctuating ebb and flow, which takes 
slightly over eleven years for its completion. So 
the magnetic needle is true to the pole only by a 
series of pendulum-like departures and returns, 
whose complete circuit requires upwards of two 
centuries and a half, while, subordinate to these, 
are minor rhythms of variation from year to year, 
from season to season, and even from day to day ; 
and, intermediate between the two, is the v^aria- 
tion that completes itself each eleven years, and 
thus curiously coincides with the sun-spot period. 
Prof. Loomis has shown that the frequency of 
the auroral light exhibits a true periodicity, fol- 
lowing closely, though not exactly, the maximum 
variations of the needle and the activity of the 
sun spots ; and it is now a familiar truth, as 
pointed out in the last United States Coast and 
Geodetic Survey, that the great magnetic storms, 
which are evidenced by violent and abnormal 
deflections of the needle, and which sometimes 
paralyze all telegraphy within wide and separated 
regions, have a rhythm which again swells and 
sinks with the mysterious activities of the sun 
spots; compounded with yearly and even daily 
tides, which reach their flood between seven and 

38 



ten in the morning, and their ebb between two 
and six in the afternoon. 

If, now, we turn from inorganic to organic 
matter, we shall find that all life, vegetable and 
animal, gives striking testimony to this suggested 
law of tide-like alternation, minute advances and 
retreats, compounded with the slower rhythm of 
permanent growth followed by decay and death. 
Plant life, which Mr. Spencer thought did not 
exhibit very marked rhythms, will be found, in 
the light of latest science, most instructive. The 
life of the plant is a continuous balancing of 
opposite functions. It is supported solely by the 
alternate in-breathing of oxygen and out-breath- 
ing of carbonic acid and water, decomposing and 
appropriating what it needs, recomposing and 
exhaling what is waste. So there is the annual 
rhythm of ascending and descending sap, from 
the roots out into the branches and leaves and 
back again to the roots. 

But it is in growth — which is nature's name 
for progress— that the most perfect type is 
found of rhythmic law. There is first the familiar 
rhythm of day and night, the plant's power to 
assimilate its food being coincident with light 
and ceasing in darkness. There is yet the still 
more familiar and slower rhythm resulting from 
the annual seasons. There is a further and 
proportioned rhythm depending on temperature, 
and shifting from hour to hour, each plant having 
its minimum and maximum degree of heat below 
and above which it refuses to grow, while be- 



39 



tvveen these two extremes, its rate of growth 
increases up to a third point of temperature, and, 
beyond that, decreases. 

But the most striking and beautiful of all plant 
rhythms is this; that, when all conditions are 
kept the same, the rate of growth is not uniform, 
but has a proportioned wave of increase and de- 
decrease, growing slowly at first, then more and 
more rapidly to amaximum, then again diminishing 
till it ceases altogether. If a series of rings be made 
round a growing shoot, after a given time the 
distance between them, as you pass from the 
point back, will be found to follow a symmetrical 
undulation, first of increase, and then of decrease. 
But this is not all ; while the plant's path of 
growth is a straight line, it holds that path only 
as the needle holds the pole, by a series of varia- 
tions from it, since, if one looks down on the 
up-growing point, it will be seen either to oscil- 
late from side to side of its true axis, or to 
describe a minute spiral about it. 

So that all vegetable life sweeps along a 
complex and rhythmic orbit of growth, much 
as a planet moves through the heavens, with 
fluctuating velocity and distinct recurrence. 

If now we pass from plant life to animal life, 
the same law of wave-like alternation still pursues 
us. Not only growth, but life itself, is main- 
tained by a multiform series of alternations, by 
alternate rests and pulsations of the heart, con- 
tractions and expansions of the lungs, successions 
of wakefulness and sleep, activity and repose. 

40 



Food is swallowed by a wave -like constriction, 
digested by a wave-like action of the stomach, 
and the waste expelled by a like action of the 
intestines. The needs of the system are recur- 
rent and periodic, as for food, drink, exercise, 
rest. The great life sustaining circulations, like 
the blood, have their circuit and their return as 
much as the currents of the ocean or the air, and, 
like them, are transmitted along their path in 
pulses or waves. Man's life is a constant battle- 
ground between contending forces, those that 
build up and those that destroy, and inch by inch 
the ground is contested. Every motion, every 
respiration, every heart-beat, every thought de- 
mands the prompt supply of new energy to 
replace it, and no atom of potential force can be 
taken into the system without being set upon at 
once by the forces of destruction and dissipated 
again in growth and motion, activity and thought. 
Only when there is a daily surplus of vital 
income over expenditure, does the body grow. 
The amount of this daily accumulation, after 
swelling to a maximum, slowly decreases till 
growth ends; then for a time the constructive 
and destructive forces hang balanced in fierce 
fight, till at last victory passes its plume to the 
destructive, and growth sinks into accelerating 
decay. 

Thus the life of animals, as of plants, perfect 
as a star through its ellipse, swings to and fro 
through the orbit of its growth with a velocity 
which rhythmically slackens as it nears maturity, 

41 



is there poised for a time in rest, and then 
rhythmically augments till death completes the 
circuit. But whether in its increase or decrease, 
this longer rhythm of growth is not simple or 
constant, but oscillating, and compounded with 
various lesser rhythms, which may retard, arrest, 
or even temporarily reverse the current. The 
whole circulation, and the pulses which are its 
weather-cock, slackens with rest, quickens with 
food or exercise. The excessive waste of the 
day is made good by night and sleep; extraor- 
dinary exertion of body or mind, conditions of 
food, drink, climate, drainage, each causes its 
separate and wave-like fluctuations. The bodily 
health is always in unstable and vibrating equi- 
librium, sensitive as a magnetic needle. The 
distribution of vital forces is never precisely the 
same one week or one day with another. The 
athlete, the oarsman, the boxer, the runner know 
that the body cannot long be kept at the severest 
pitch of training, neither is it always panoplied 
alike against danger, disease or death. The 
springtime of life has its days of winter chill, 
while even into November steals sometimes a 
glint of gold from life's vanished summer. 

The minor changes from health to sickness or 
from sickness back to health are not constant, 
but waning health has its waves of revival, and 
returning health its waves of relapse. That 
disease is essentially rhythmic, with major and 
minor fluctuations, needs not the telling, to those 
who remember the illness of Grant, Conkling, 
42 



Sheridan and the Emperor Frederick ; above all, 
not to that nation of watchers over Garfield's 
bed, who saw, hoping against hope, the wavelets 
of returning vigor creep bravely back towards 
life, knowing that the slipping tide was all the 
while setting outwards towards death. 

Pain and delirium come in paroxysms, settled 
madness may have its intervals of sanity, and 
has always periodic undulations, whether in 
improvement or decline. Fever sweeps to a 
climax, and has periodic waves of increase and 
decrease at night and morning. And, underly- 
ing plant and animal alike, and breaking in 
through all these minor rhythms as the deep 
swing of the sea through voices on the shore, is 
the great rhythm of life and death, against which 
no man may stop his ears. 

From the known symmetry of nature's work- 
ing, we might well expect that so universal a law 
of development in matter and life would hold 
also of the individual mind. Indeed, short reflec- 
tion will teach us that the mind, too, in its needs, 
development, activities and products, is essen- 
tially rhythmic, and closely follows the plant and 
the animal. Like them, it has its central and 
graduated climax of development and decay, and, 
like them, it sweeps along its path of growth by 
rhythmic alternations of tension and repose. 
Like the body, it cannot be held to its best, but 
swerves. None of its activities are incessant. 
Like the bow in light, or the battering ram in 
ponderous things, after exerting its utmost power 

43 



it must be drawn back to gain new. Its mastery 
of a subject or a problem is, like a battle, by 
successive shocks of attack and recoil, and, often, 
on the eve of defeat the supreme charge bril- 
liantly wins the day. 

Mental emotions, too, are rhythmic. Sorrow 
shows itself in sobs, and deepest grief never 
racks the mind with equal, but with recurrent, vio- 
lence. Sudden or great joy, too, has its wave- 
like alternations, and often shows itself in short, 
recurrent rhythm of shout or song or leap or 
dance. Desires, appetites, impulses — intellectual^ 
moral and religious — are not constant, but wave- 
like and periodic. Love steals in through the 
windows of the soul in gentle undulations, like 
the lapsing of a brook, grows by recurrent pulsa- 
tions, and, at times, stirred by the presence, the 
memory or the fortunes of the loved, sweeps 
over the soul in mighty waves of tenderness. 
Ambition, whether it "blows through bronze or 
breathes through silver," rouses not by constant, 
but by intermittent inspiration. The soul is not 
always, or equally, fired by its great enthusiasms. 
So with the fiercer impulses. The passions ride, 
Valkyr-like and in gusts, across the soul. Anger 
blows through it in hot blasts, with proportioned 
climax and subsidence. Hate, even when directed 
to an object of fixed repugnance, sometimes 
slumbers, and again surges across the soul in 
resistless, yet rhythmic, torrent. 

But not only is the mind rhythmic as a star in 
its general orbit of growth, but, in its movement 

44 



along that orbit, it offers a beautiful parallel to 
the rhythm of the plant. The mind does not, 
and cannot, grow by the simultaneous develop- 
ment of all its faculties, but pushes forward first 
one faculty and then another, as the plant pushes 
forward first one side, then another, of its grow- 
ing stem. There is even a certain natural and 
harmonious order of development for the differ- 
ent faculties, childhood for observation, youth 
for imagination, manhood for reasoning and 
reflection. But even after the common maturity 
of all, the alternation of their growth continues 
by the necessary laws of mind. From the study 
of human nature in senate or forum, the mind 
turns naturally to — 

"The love of learning, the sequestered nooks 
And all the sweet serenity of books." 

In reading, the mind has the same craving for 
rhythm, which itself is rest ; and, after following 
the packed thought of Spencer, the philosophy 
of Mill or Arnold, the sweet seriousness of 
Fuller, or the sombre eloquence of Hooker or 
Jeremy Taylor, we turn to drink and drink again 
of Emerson's universal waters; to see the golden 
and god-like images of Plato's thought spring 
from the homely and Silenic sculpture of his 
dialogue ; to hang on the words of Socrates, till, 
like Alcibiades, we needs must "stop our ears 
and flee away as from the Sirens, lest we should 
sit down beside him and grow old in listening to 
his talk." 

From these again we turn to the strange 

45 



prose-music of Sir Thomas Browne, or the dainty 
and infinitesimal pomp of Herrick; or, if — 

" Wandering lonely as a cloud, . 
In vacant or in pensive mood," 

we gaze with Wordsworth on the 

" Host of golden daffodils, 

Beside the lake, beneath the trees, 
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze ; " 

and let them — 

" Flash upon that inward eye. 

Which is the bliss of solitude, 
Until our heart with pleasure fills 
And dances with the daffodils." 

If sad, we turn to the rich melancholy of 
Lycidas, to — 

" The rathe primrose that forsaken dies," . . . 

"The cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, 

And every flower that sad embroidery wears." 

And, since it has been beautifully said, that 
"nature always wears the colors of the spirit," 
we may bid our — 

" Daffodils fill their cups with tears. 

To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." 

If yet differently minded, we may bathe in the 
celestial beauty of Shelley, till our — 

• • • " Soul is an enchanted boat, 

Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float 
Upon the silver waves of his sweet singing." 

Or else we may link arms with Tennyson, and 
go with him to — 

" Read and rhyme in solitary fields. 

The lark above, the nightingale below. 
And answer them in song." 

46 



Or reverting to the poet's poet, we may muse 
with Hobbinoll on "wasteful hills" and see — 

" Calliope with muses moe, 

Soon as his oaten pipe begins to sound, 
Their ivory lutes and tambourines forego, 

And, from the fountain where they sat around, 
Renne after hastely his silver sound." 

Or if books tire as sometime they must, then 
be a "lover of uncontained and immortal beauty ;" 
go with Emerson, who fits all great things, to 
Nature ; to the woods, "those plantations of God, 
where is perpetual youth, where a decorum and 
sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, 
and the guest sees not how he should tire of 
them in a thousand years!" Study with him 
the " succession of native plants in the pastures 
and roadsides, which makes the silent clock by 
which time tells the summer hours !" 

Turn your face up to the wonderful dome of 
Day, with its "tent of dropping clouds," to the 
pavilioned Night where "all the stars make gold 
of all the air" to the "azure sky, over whose 
unspotted deeps the winds forevermore drive 
flocks of stormy clouds and leave no wrinkle or 
stain !" 

Yet even from the infinite inspiration of 
nature, the mind in time must turn, not from 
fault or flaw in her, but from the mind's neces- 
sary craving for the rhythm of change. Each 
sense and faculty is a vessel which cannot be 
more than filled without overflowing, and must 
be emptied before it can be filled again. So, 

47 



after protracted exercise or enjoyment in travel, 
art, literature, the mind overflows, and can hold 
no more. The most spacious thoughts, the 
noblest verse, the loftiest ideals of beauty, in 
nature, music, poetry, art, morals, religion, no 
longer strike or hold the mind. Thus the mind 
as a whole refreshes itself by the double rhythm 
of variety in action and total rest, and each 
faculty rests while another is active. So that 
the whole complex movement of mental growth 
is made up of rhythms, each faculty growing by 
pendulum-like swings from activity to rest, while 
the whole mind pushes along a rhythmic orbit of 
development and decay, by a movement which, 
like that of the plant stem, by urging on its 
separate powers successively and not simul- 
taneously, results in constant and rhythmic 
oscillation across its true axis of growth. Com- 
pounded with all these regular rhythms of mental 
development are lesser and irregular ones, follow- 
ing bodily health or sickness, mental equanimity 
or anxiety, excessive use or disuse. Extraor- 
dinary stimulus, too, a superb occasion, the heat 
of intense solitary thought, the friction and flash 
of antagonism, the dazzling fence of debate, the 
quick thrust and parry of legal controversy, 
forces the mind, makes it think easily, nimbly, 
holds it to the point, gives fitting and splendid 
drapery to its thought, fills it with images, makes 
it crystalline, imperial. 

Learn in another way the inherent rhythm of 
mind — through her products — by which alone 

48 



she is made known to us. As all the simple 
underlying emanations from matter, light, heat, 
electricity, move in waves, so the products of the 
mind are rhythmic. 

All speech is rhythmic ; accent and stress is 
what gives the spoken sentence piquancy and 
power. Every accented word has itself a double 
rhythm of cadence and stress. Every clause 
has in it many musical notes. Every sentence 
moves to its climax by progressive shocks of 
emphasis, and, in crude or perfect fashion, is 
built in harmonic proportions. Each sentence is 
a fleet of merchantmen ready for a tow. Prepo- 
sitions and conjunctions are hawsers to tie them 
together, adjectives are but flags to bedeck and 
draw the eye, but nouns and verbs are heavy 
with cargo, and in their holds are packed the 
real riches of thought. These are the electric 
jars where power is stored, and from them it is 
transmitted in shocks, rhythmically. 

Music is professedly rhythmic, but an opera, 
symphony, oratorio, is great as it combines the 
rhythm of single notes or instruments in propor- 
tioned cadence. 

Eloquence is electric, like the shock from a 
battery. The orator in his persuasions, the 
lawyer or statesman in his argument, is rhythmic. 
He approaches it from afar, warily, and from 
common ground with his hearer. He assaults 
and then withdraws, chooses a new point of 
attack, gathers strength with each recoil, beats 
down opposing facts by alternate blows and 

49 



rests, hurls at them wave after wave of meta- 
phor, logic, eloquence, reserves himself always 
for his climax, at last brings up all his reserves, 
and storms the citadel. 

Poetry is rhythmic — fine prose no less. 
Tacitus, in the very first line of his story, fell 
upon a verse ; and Cicero, declaiming for a poet, 
found his first sentence a perfect hexameter. 
In that wonderful book, Lorna Doone, Black- 
more breaks again and again into unconscious 
verse. Milton never struck a diviner harmony 
than do the prose-poems of Sir Thomas Browne. 
"Give me health and a day," cries Emerson, 
" and I will make the pomp of emperors ridicu- 
lous. The dawn is my Assyria, the sunset and 
moon-rise my Paphos and unimaginable realms 
of Faerie ; broad noon shall be my England of 
the senses and the understanding ; the night 
shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and 
dreams." What music ever surpassed this in 
rhythm ! 

If, then rhythm, both in movement and devel- 
opment, is the law of nature and the individual 
mind, is it not equally the law of associated 
mind ; of communities, states, civilizations ; of 
the unfolding of literature, science and the arts ; 
of the mighty currents of trade, of the great flow 
of opinion from age to age ? Like the stars in 
eternal procession up the sky, or those strange 
moons of Mars, which pass through all their 
phases before our eyes and in a single night, so, 
one by one, the nations of the earth climb their 

50 



zenith and decline, in rhythmic path of waxing 
and retreating splendor. The pomp of Assyria, 
dark Egypt, with mystery of sphynx and pyra- 
mid, Greece, with white limbs and unsandaled 
feet, profiled, like her Parthenon, perfect against 
the centuries, Rome, mistress of dominion ; 
states and empires since — Germany, the nurse of 
learning, England, of philosophy and the senses, 
America, dowered with the priceless trust of 
freedom — all have passed, or are passing, through 
their cycle of development and decay. 

But a nation's progress, whether towards 
greatness or decline, is not constant, but fluctu- 
ating ; even in the glorious days of Greece she 
is brought to straits, when "Leonidas and his 
three hundred martyrs consumed one day in 
dying, and the sun and moon came each and 
looked at them once in the sharp defile of 
Thermopylae." The same of Rome; Hannibal 
knocks at her gates in midst of her growing 
power, while Trajan, Aurelius, Julian break with 
transient splendor the days of her decline. So, 
for every nation, Austerlitz leads up to Waterloo, 
and Jena is avenged by Sedan. 

The story of literature is the development by 
cycles, by alternations of barrenness and luxuri- 
ance, by rhythmic recurrence of splendid epochs. 

The age of Chaucer is followed by that of 
Shakespere, then of Milton, of the Restoration, 
of Anne. Each period has its central figure, 
about which all the others cluster, and, to and 
from that central figure, each has its more or 

51 



less rhythmic progress, climax and decline. The 
tide, which rose high in Wickliffe and Chaucer, 
gave place to the refluent waves of Skelton, 
Wyatt and Surrey, then swung back through 
Spencer and Marlow to Shakespere, and slowly 
ebbed away through Jonson, Fletcher and 
Massinger. 

So, too, there is a rhythmic progress in the 
character of literature, which, in cyclic fashion, 
repeats itself with different peoples. Eschylus, 
Sophocles, Euripides typify a transition, which 
was roughly followed by Corneille, Racine and 
Victor Hugo, by Shakespere, Massinger and 
Congreve. In each case — speaking in a broad 
way — the earliest writer has greater boldness of 
wing, fire and flow of imagination ; the second 
draws the gentler passions and has a correcter 
taste ; the third balances, writes in epigrams, 
over-refines. 

So each literature has its oscillations peculiar 
to itself, as the swing from the exuberance of 
the early Elizabethan, from Marlowe and Shake- 
spere to the severer harmonies of Milton ; again, 
at the Restoration, from the licentious wit of 
Wycherley or Congreve to the elegant reserve of 
Addison, the formal style and polished epigrams 
of Pope. 

As with literature, so with the arts, archi- 
tecture, painting, sculpture. They appear and 
disappear, wax and wane, in periods. Thus 
architecture, in its three classic orders, the 
Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, passes through 

52 



essentially the same rhythm of development, 
from severity to grace and at last over-refine- 
ment, as in the three leading types of modern 
architecture, the old Gothic, the Decorated and 
the Perpendicular, typified in the Cathedral at 
Durham, the Abbey at Melrose, and in Roslyn 
Chapel; and this cycle of development will 
be seen to curiously correspond with that of 
literature. 

Again, civilization, like the mind, is rhythmic, 
in that it pushes forward and develops first one 
set of powers and then another, and hence its 
progress is ever rhythmically oscillating, like the 
growing plant, in a complicated spiral about its 
real axis of development. An age of observa- 
tion, of patient gathering and noting of facts, is 
succeeded by an age of reflection, in which facts 
are compared, analyzed, classified, set in order 
around principles, and brilliant and profound 
truths drawn from them. 

So an age of criticism and skepticism follows 
an age of faith, an age of metaphysics is chased 
by one of materialism, Kant and Hegel by 
Comte and Mill. 

The same rhythm holds in special lines of 
movement. Literature vibrates from luxuriance 
to purism. Architecture becomes Gothic, en- 
riches itself more and more, multiplies decoration, 
throws out flying buttresses, flowers with intri- 
cate and artistic forms, overloads itself, then 
turns back to the classical, reproduces the severe 
types of Greece and Rome, passes to the 

53 



Renascence. Music swings from the broad, 
strong tones of Handel and Bach, to the delicacy 
of Mendelssohn, the subtle, haunting, many 
voiced moods of Chopin, the intricate ornamen- 
tation of Rossini ; then breaks off, and welcomes 
the severe harmony, the unity, the ennobling 
and spiritual beauty of Wagner. 

The progress of Science is by successive 
oscillations from the deductive to the inductive. 
Aristotle treads on the heels of Plato, and Bacon 
puts to rout the speculations of the Schoolmen. 

The progress of political opinion in England, 
France, America, whatever be the names of 
parties, is by constant and rhythmic vibrations 
from liberal to conservative, and back again to 
liberal, with even a tolerable uniformity of 
period. In our own government, whose type is 
distinctly planetary, with municipal governments 
revolving about the state, and both circling 
around the federal as their center and sun, there 
is the same balanced rhythm between the oppos- 
ing forces, centralization and dissolution, as is 
seen in the solar system, and from period to 
period there has gone on a constant and shifting 
oscillation from one extreme towards the other, 
up to Jackson's time swinging slowly towards 
enlargement of federal powers, then more and 
more rapidly towards the doctrine of State 
rights, till, by the crisis of civil war, the pendu- 
lum sharply swung the other way; while today 
in the late decisions of the Supreme Court of the 
United States, and in the growing public demand 

54 



for the right of the State to prohibit the sale of 
imported Hquor, as part of the local police power, 
is seen again the beginnings of an opposite 
movement. 

Religion in all ages has moved along a recur- 
rent path of excesses to a crisis, ending in 
reform. Brahminism has yielded to Buddhism, 
Paganism to Christianity, Romanism to Luther. 
So, all great moral and religious enthusiasms, as 
the spread of Mohamedanism, the rise of the 
crusades, roll in billows over the world. 

The currents of trade, commerce, finance, are 
distinctively rhythmic. The values of things, of 
wheat, corn, stocks, have their great periodic 
undulations, reaching over many years, combined 
with lesser rhythms of monthly, daily and even 
hourly variation. The flow of money from the 
east to the south and west in the fall, and the 
counterflow of the great staples, corn, cotton, 
wheat, to the east, have a definite and recurrent 
path and time. The contending forces of supply 
and demand are continually disturbing the exist- 
ing equilibrium of industries, attracting capital 
and labor to those businesses where consump- 
tion exceeds production and where prices are 
high, and, by that very act, crowding the busi- 
ness thus selected, bringing about an excess of 
production over consumption, and thus again 
lowering the price. Great commercial panics 
have a general periodicity, in England of ten 
years, in America of twenty ; and their approach 
is heralded, according to an acute French writer, 

55 



by six successive years of sharp demand for 
money, which in turn indicates over-investment 
and speculation. 

Nor, holding bravely to our law of rhythm, 
need we be disheartened, if civilization be not 
always in the stress and thrill of onset, or, with 
all drums beating, pressing forward in victorious 
advance ; for we know that, like the tides, it has 
its halts and seeming retrogressions. 

Neither aggregate nor individual growth is a 
ladder of which every round is above the last, 
but progresses only by fluctuations. The latest 
speech of the great orator is not always his best ; 
and the same of the poet, the thinker, the 
novelist. Yet each is still pursuing the rhyth- 
mic law of growth, and though the Pickwick 
Papers were not equalled by Baniaby Riidge 
and Martin Chnzzleivit, and though Adavi Bede 
stood unmatched by the Mill on the Floss or 
Silas Marner, still the greatness of Bleak House 
and Roniola was yet to come; and by and by, 
pricked by some great spur, the orator, the poet, 
the thinker, will mightily overpass all his pre- 
vious limit of achievement. Two centuries 
passed after Chaucer before another great name 
was given to English letters, and yet, by and by, 
Shakespere followed. Learn patience, then, 
from Nature, who never is in haste. Think not 
ever that the best has been. Presently, from 
the deep places of the sea, one more royal than 
Shakespere will swing past you, thunderous, 



56 



and, far up the shore, will leave his lonely 
gauntlet, the wonder of coming time ! 

Thus we have imperfectly traced our sug- 
gested law of rhythm from matter through mind 
to society. We have seen that all nature, 
whether in its sweetness or terror, wooing or 
threatening, beats with unresting rhythm ; that 
a liquid, struck, moves in waves, a solid, in 
atomic vibration; that mind and society, wher- 
ever touched, show themselves by rhythmic 
products, as ice, smitten, breaks into crystals, or 
the lark into music at the call of dawn. 

Yet, so the wisest tell us, with the universe, 
even as with the ephemera, evolution must be 
followed by dissolution, the rhythm of life by 
the rhythm of death ; they tell us that the time 
will come when our earth shall become like the 
frozen moon, and all things shall be wrapped, 
not in flame of fire, but in universal and over- 
coming cold ; that, in consequence, all life shall 
dwindle and disappear, and man and mind, 
unfed by the solar ray, shall cease to act or be ; 
that the universe itself is held together only by 
the equilibrium of attraction and repulsion; that 
the increasing resistance of the inter-stellar 
medium may slowly lessen the velocity of all 
planetary motion; that the attractive forces, 
being thus less and less opposed, may gradually 
gain ascendancy, that planets and satellites, thus 
brought nearer and nearer to rest, may be left 
unprotected against the in-drawing of gravita- 
tion; that moon after moon will be drawn back 

57 



into its original planet ; planet after planet into 
its original sun, till at last all extinct suns and 
systems that are, are hurled with unimaginable 
shock upon their common centre, and the whole 
mass, gasified by the fierce impact, rushes back 
again to nebula and chaos ! Who then can tell, 
if the stars must be put out, as the lights of the 
banquet when the guests are fled, and even the 
mighty pendulum of Time must at last beat 
itself still ; who can tell if the universe be not 
already past high noon, and if the finger of Time 
be not already flinging backward shadows on the 
dial of Eternity? 

Well, then, did the poet cry, as he looked out 
on the world of things : 

" Flow, flow the waves hated, 

Accursed, adored, 

The waves of mutation ; 

No anchorage is. 

Sleep is not, death is not ; 

Who seem to die, live. 

House you were born in, 

Friends of your spring-time, 

Old man and young maid, 

Day's toil and its guerdon, 

They are all vanishing, 

Fleeing like fables, 

Cannot be moored. , . . 

Know, the stars yonder, 

The stars everlasting. 

Are fugitive also, 

And emulate, vaulted, 

The lambent heat-lightning. 

And fire fly's flight." 

58 



Amid all this flux of things, where, as 
Heraclitus held, "all things come into being, 
and forthwith cease to be," what wonder that 
the soul of the Oriental finds relief in the 
philosophy of repose ! God at least, the All in 
One, is eternal ; and, as in Wagner's great 
music drama of the Trilogy, through the 
evasive, aurora-like tremblings of the Fire- 
Motive, breaks the stately music of the Walhalla, 
so, through this shifting rhythm of things, 
sounds Arnold's noble verse — 

" Never the Spirit was born ; the Spirit shall cease to 
be never ; 
Never was time it was not ; end and beginning are 
dreams 
Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the 
Spirit forever ; 
Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the 
house of it seems." 



59 



JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD 

Memorial Address, September 2^, 1 88 I 

Mr. President and Fellow Citizens — 
James Abram Garfield, the President whom we 
loved and whom the people chose, is dead. That 
life which we held so dear and had watched so 
tenderly, that life which stood almost for the 
country's life, was snuffed out like some brief 
candle of the night. 

The nation has lost its chief, and today the 
whole world of business and of pleasure has put 
its shoes from off its feet, and stands reverently 
about the grave, holding the inverted torch. 
The bell, the solemn gun, the shut stores, the 
draped and mourning dwellings — all the outward 
trappings of woe only speak and poorly the 
heaviness of the heart. 

Nor does America mourn alone. From the 
great governments of Europe, from Emperor 
and Queen and President and Pope and people, 
from the great and from the lowly, come noble 
and touching tributes and sympathy, while the 
flowers of England's Queen are on the coffin of 
our dead, and the mute masses of England's 
people bow with us in a common grief. 

This is no ordinary spectacle. After death, if 
not before, oblivion claims most of us. 

6i 



. . . . " we are as the blast, 

A moment heard and then forever past." 

Says the quaint Sir Thomas Browne: "The 
greater part must be content to be as though 
they had not been, to be found in the register of 
God, not in the record of man." 

To what does Mr. Garfield owe this excep- 
tional and universal homage.? Is it paid him as 
the President, as the statesman, or as the man } 
Our loss is too fresh to admit a cold analysis of 
his character, or to place him in history with the 
exactness of criticism. It will be for the best 
and noblest of the land to clothe his virtues in 
fitting drapery. Yet we are here not merely to 
anoint his memory with our tears, but to pluck a 
lesson, like a flower, to take with us from his 
grave. 

As a President he was grave, dignified, noble. 
His advisers, led by a brilliant and distinguished 
statesman, commanded the confidence of his 
party and of the country. Through them he 
preserved dignified and friendly relations with 
foreign powers, economized the public funds, 
confirmed the public credit, exposed fraud and 
reformed abuses. In his brief administration he 
aimed to be the President of the whole people. 
Firm without obstinacy, recognizing all factions, 
attacking no one, but bold to defend whenever a 
right was attacked, he extorted the respect of 
his opponents, and won the love of his friends. 
In Southern policy he gave promise of being 
conciliatory without being weak, and generous 

62 



without ceasing to be just. In person approach- 
able and kindly, his simple ways and life were 
not left behind him at the door of the White 
House, but he brought the man with him to the 
Presidency, and the people. North and South, 
Democrat and Republican, believed in him and 
were content with him. They find no spot in 
the seamless garment of his fame. 

Yet the people do not mourn today chiefest 
their President murdered. 

As a statesman he was solid, rather than 
brilliant ; conservative, rather than bold ; but, 
above all, true to his convictions and fearless in 
their advocacy. His intellect was of command- 
ing order, massive, logical, trained. I need only 
instance that remarkable series of short and 
non-political speeches made before his election, 
to show the comprehensiveness of his grasp, the 
ripeness of his thought, the variety of his food. 
In truth "reading maketh a full man," and what 
he had read he had not merely "tasted," but 
"chewed and digested." He was emphatically 
the scholar in politics. He knew 

" The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, 
And all the sweet serenity of books." 

Not only from the great masterpieces of litera- 
ture, but from many a wayside and forgotten 
flower he drew treasures which gave body and 
richness to his serious sentences. His fondness 
for the early English authors led him to express 
his thought simply and strongly in sturdy 

63 



Saxon phrase, never ornate, yet not wanting in 
appropriate and splendid imagery. He used 
illustration to illumine rather than to adorn. 
His sentences were massed in close array, and 
bristled with compact thought. They moved 
and stood with the solidity of the Saxon foot, 
rather than the elegance of the Norman horse. 

Yet, great as he was, the people do not mourn 
today only their statesman dead. 

After all, the lesson that he leaves us is not of 
Garfield the President or the statesman, but of 
Garfield the man. In him American citizenship 
had its perfect and consummate flower. Loyal 
and generous, he cut a kindness in stone, and 
wrote a wrong in ashes. Simple, kindly, affec- 
tionate, true — it is on the grave of the man that 
we drop our garlands and our tears. 

When Socrates had drunk the hemlock and 
had walked about a little, and then lay down and 
death came, and Crito had closed his mouth 
and eyes — "this," says the loving disciple in his 
simple and beautiful eulogy — "this was the end 
of our associate ; a man, as it appears to me, the 
best of those that we were acquainted with at 
that time," 

Such a man was revealed to us by the fatal 
second of July, and the wearing, weary weeks 
that followed. 

It has been beautifully said that even "in 
private places and among sordid objects an act 
of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to 
itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its 

H 



candle." How much more when the doer of the 
act is the ruler of a people ! So Garfield grandly 
lived and grandly died, and the whitest blossom 
on the coffin today is his own modest, Christian 
character, which struck its roots silently and 
deeply in the cabin, on the tow-path, in the 
school and in the college. There he gat hold on 
the very foundations of power ; and moving thus, 
what wonder that as he climbed height after 
height of fame and wrapped himself with glory 
as with a garment — what wonder that fifty 
millions of people " followed his steps with the 
rose and the violet." 

"As a plant upon the earth," says Emerson, 
"so a man rests upon the bosom of God ; he is 
nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at 
his need, inexhaustible power." 

For us, then, the tears. For him there is no 
need to mourn. For him death is not an end, 
but a change, not a wall that stops the way, but 
a door that swings open on a landscape of 
immortal beauty. 

Thou pure patriot, thou ripe scholar, thou 
sober statesman, thou gallant friend, crowned at 
once with the amaranth and the laurel, with 
death and with immortality, the finger on the 
lips and the mute emulation of thy virtues are 
thy best eulogium ! We leave thee pillowed in 
a nation's arms, not forgetting to utter, ere we 
go, the thrice-said burial-rite of the ancients : 

Vale, vale, vale, nos te ordine 
Quo natura permittet, sequemur. 

65 



SPEECH AT G. A. R. ENCAMPMENT 

Augusta, February 4, l8go 

Nearly a generation has passed since the war 
begun, a quarter of a century since its close. 
Many young men and women, now full grown, 
are entering on the responsibilities of citizenship, 
who never lisped the war songs, nor followed 
the dubious track of battle, whose hearts never 
rose with victory or sank with disaster. Others 
there are, who, though too young for service, yet 
in school or shop, by farm or fireside, hung upon 
the fate of your arms as Troy might do on 
Hector's. It is fitting tonight that these and all 
of us should sit at your feet and listen to the 
story of the saving of the Republic. 

But to you who were actors, not spectators, 
who sprang from bench, and work, and study, 
stirred by the trumpet call of country — whose 
bed was too often the earth, and whose tent was 
the approving sky — to you, citizen soldiers of 
the Grand Army of the Republic, this is indeed 
a night of glorious reminiscence, when memory 
winds her awakening horn through forgotten 
chambers of the soul, and, like the sea shell held 
to the ear, reproduces with faint and mimic 
noise the story of a life lived long ago. Under 
the spell of memory how the old days come 
back. When upon the air, already charged as 

67 



from electric batteries, Sumter came, and the 
souls of men took fire, their thoughts and lives 
spread broad and deep, and deeds of inspired 
courage and passion came easy. Then the cry 
rang, "To arms!" and as with one mind a great 
nation weaponed itself for battle; war's stem 
and stirring music piped on every hand, files and 
squadrons marched and mustered in each village 
street; under fluttering banners long farewells 
were said, and men looked grave as they gazed 
for the last time on each other's faces, and then 
turned sternly to the front. Since that stirring 
time you have nearly swept through the orbit of 
a generation, and, with fitting rhythm, have 
swung back tonight to this place whence so 
many of you set out for the war. Not with full 
numbers now! for, one by one, they have struck 
their earthly tents, and marched on to that 
hither country where the soldier rests from 
fighting. Year by year on Decoration Day, 
with our reverent flowers we climb the hillsides 
where the sleepers now lie so thick that the 
graves seem almost to grow faster than the 
flowers which fill our hands. Yet, as once in 
the toss and flare of battle, so now in solemn 
peace, year by year you have closed up your 
thinning ranks and brought tears and flowers for 
the out-numbering dead. But even you may 
boast no monopoly of death. Soon or late he 
makes bedfellow with each of us. In waking 
and in sleep he shadows us, and comes unbidden, 
like Banquo even to the feast. If we face him 

68 



he still slips behind us, and the fleetest runner 
may not hope to outrun him. 

I know you will bear with me if we turn for 
one moment from the memories of war, and, 
with shoes put off our feet, tread reverently the 
sacred ground of private grief. Heads which 
have grown gray in the public service, hearts 
very near to the soldiers of Maine and of the 
Nation, this very day are bowed and breaking 
under a close and double sorrow. Twice within 
a few brief days has thieving death slipped into 
their household, and each time stolen jewels. 
Today for the second time the great Secretary 
and his noble wife stand uncovered in the 
presence of their dead ; this time a daughter, 
whose kindly benefactions to the poor, whose 
devotion to charity and to the Church spread 
gladness round her, living, and left many to 
weep her dead. 

Only a little time before, the mournful music 
had again sounded, and their elder son had been 
committed to the unreturning dust. To his 
father he was all which the tenderness of son- 
ship implies, at once his right hand and his staff, 
adviser, companion, friend and confidant. He 
lived but for his father and to keep from him 
even the flecks of annoyance. The tale he 
begun to tell was always interrupted if his father 
spoke, to be rebegun only when his father had 
finished. The beautiful thing in it was that he 
did this not from awe or fear, but from the 
instinct of respect and love. Between the Secre- 

69 



tary and the eager, besetting public he stood, as 
the breakwater between the harbor and the sea, 
that in those still inner waters great thoughts, 
like ships, might ride unvexed. 

He had a rare tact with men and an exquisite 
deference for women. Wherever he was, he 
never forgot that he was a gentleman, and his 
unfailing courtesy flowed, like the air, to all 
alike, to the child and the gray beard, to the 
humble and the high. Welcome to and gracing 
the most polished society, he never forgot that 
man was born before society, and humanity was 
broader than culture. His reading was wide 
and intelligent, his memory stored and respon- 
sive, his writing graceful and effective. In talk 
he had his father's fascination, and superadded 
somewhat of the appealing grace of a woman, 
calling for sympathy and love. At home he was 
charming and affectionate, and nothing can fill 
the widening loss to mother, and sisters, and 
brothers. Above all he moved through life with 
a rare gentleness. Though young in years he 
had almost a woman's thoughtfulness for others, 
and many an unnoticed deed of kindness will 
keep his memory green in sorrowing hearts. 
Soldiers as well as citizens have cause to remem- 
ber him, for almost the last act of his life, before 
the fatal sickness overtook him, was to restore 
to an old soldier, under circumstances familiar to 
your presiding officer, the meagre pension which 
his years of service had earned, that he might 
pass his few remaining years in comparative 

70 



comfort. He went for this in person to the 
Secretary of War, and the latter gracefully wrote 
him that he had made up his mind to refuse his 
next request to prove that he was not irresist- 
ible ; but he granted the boon so unselfishly 
asked for another. Sweetly must the sun have 
set on his dying bed, and on its beams he passed 
into eternal rest. There at the beautiful gates 
of the Valhalla his worth shall be warrant of his 
welcome, for he was kind to many, and he died 
loved of all. He was my friend, and I may not 
speak of him as I ought. If he had faults they 
were too few to tell, or only such as endeared 
him. 

" Hail then and harken from the realms of help ! 

That still, despite the distance and the dark, 
What was, again may be : some interchange 

Of grace, some splendor once thy very thought. 
Some benediction anciently thy smile." 

Soldiers of the war, the white blossom of 

sympathy springs easily from the grave, and 

gentleness becomes the hero like a flower. 

Shall we not then tonight suspend for a moment 

our festal wreaths while we send to the bereaved 

this soldier's tribute for the soldier's friend.? 

But you, Veterans of the Blue, whose valor and 

sacrifices have given us this united country for 

which we speak — what shall we say of you ? 

" To say you were welcome were superfluous. 
To place upon the volume of your deeds, 
As in a title page, your worth in arms, 
Were more than you expect, or more than's fit, 
Since every worth in show commends itself." 

71 



Only this : — That whatsoever grateful words 
or willing hearts may do to welcome you, is 
yours. Nay, whatsoever else is ours of hospi- 
tality, or cheer or banquet, we make it yours. 
Ill fares it with the land you saved when your 
"worth shall not be warrant of your welcome." 
Ye are the survivors of what is indeed, the 
Grand Army of the Republic. Fear not that 
with increasing years or lessening numbers your 
welcome shall abate. The great pines of the 
forest seem the statelier for their fallen fellows 
whom we miss, and grow in value with lapse of 
time. And so you wearers of the Blue shall, like 
the leaves of the Sibyl, but gather glory from 
your wasting numbers. You have a right to 
dwell upon your country, for you made it free, 
and on your own past for you made it glorious. 
Time was, when the nation stood at the narrow 
pass between life and death, and called her sons 
to save her. Maine did not lag behind, but sent 
forth her sons as the unnumbered pines shake 
out their needles to the gust. For four long 
years whenever cloudy heights were to be scaled, 
or death flashed forth from scabbards, Maine 
was there. From the opening battles of Bull 
Run to the passing of swords at Appomattox, 
the Maine troops held their way. When Grant 
burst, conquering into Vicksburg, and on the 
Fourth of July formed his troops in square about 
the Court-house heights, Maine was there. With 
Sherman when he sheared through the heart of 
the rebellion, and marched to the sounding sea, 

72 



Maine was there. In the death-swamps about 
Richmond, in the prisons of Libby and Belle 
Isle, Maine blood sank and Maine lives wasted ; 
and at Gettysburg, in the critical moment of the 
war, when, on their own soil, the battle long 
hung doubtful, and hope was fast yielding to 
despair, when charge after charge had failed, and 
at last the whole fury of the rebellion swept 
round the heights at Round Top, Maine was 
there with Chamberlain and Howard, to turn 
desperate disaster into the ringing cheer of 
victory ! On that day and those that follow it, 
the old America, the America of slavery and 
contested constitution closed its life. And by 
the Grand Army of the Republic the gates were 
swung open upon the America of the future, the 
America of freedom and increasing states and 
stars, and while with words we welcome you to 
this scene of reminiscence, in very truth and in 
a larger sense it is you who welcome us to this 
great country of the future. 

When the soldier, on guard or picket, begirt 
with danger and with dark, all night long has 
outwatched the circling Bear, none know like 
you how he strains his eyes for the coming of 
the day, or, weary with the long day's march and 
fighting, how he longs to let slip his cares into 
the great peace of night. And yet, not morning, 
when flushed and jocund it comes on tiptoe over 
the eastern hills; not night, when she wraps 
herself about with the glory and gold of the 
stars, ever ushered in a transition of such 

73 



splendor as that which your valor offers the 
American people. Politically we are free. That 
taint of slavery is out forever. Forty-two states 
and stars already cluster on our banners. Ter- 
ritorially we are varied, fertile, exhaustless. In 
population and wealth we are moving rapidly 
forward. Industrially it were hard to set a limit 
to our possibilities. Sections and climates the 
most diverse, contribute their products. The 
North is pouring out its manufactures and its 
colonies, and the South, which has long lain 
fallow, has for the first time unlocked the secret 
of her marvelous resources. Externally there is 
no foe to vex, while, under the Congress of 
Nations, our commerce may fast stretch itself to 
new conquests in the rich regions of our own 
continent, long shut to us. Our tender sky of 
literature is slowly filling with constellations. 
Against the lyre of Tennyson we put the sweet 
reed-music of Longfellow, while Emerson is 
already immortal with Bacon and Browning in 
the Westminster of the skies. To all this you, 
the living and the dead, are welcoming us. To 
commemorate this fact, in the person of your 
distinguished Commander, the pines of Michigan 
have come nodding to the pines of Maine, and 
we give them welcome. Those that are gone 
beckon us forward, and blow inspiration back. 
May we learn from you, as from them, the 
lesson of chaste and sober living, of high aims, 
of the beauty of sincerity, of the infinite gentle- 
ness of heroism. 

74 



MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS 

Augusta, May JO, l8gi 

War is essentially revolting. It sacks and 
burns and kills and from its very nature must 
do so. It obliterates art, blackens and defaces 
nature, depopulates and destroys cities. It 
devours wealth, piles up debt, drinks up the lives 
of the best and the bravest. It makes light of 
all the treasures of the past, ravages books, 
scatters great libraries, stifles literature, diverts 
the intellectual strength of the nation, from 
knowledge, to conquest and slaughter. Its very 
virtues are fierce and animal. That something 
in all of us which responds to the note of war, 
which is roused by the trumpet's blare, by 
waving banners, by the spirit-stirring drum, by 
the pomp and pride of armies, by the march, 
by the bivouac, by the battle's light, is, after all, 
the fierce brute within us, which stirs and 
growls, and would slip its leash and be appeased 
with blood. Great wars, therefore, the Persian 
invasions, the Punic, the Thirty Years' War, the 
wars of the French Revolution, of the Peninsula, 
of Franco-Germany, — great battles, Marathon, 
Agincourt, Hastings, Waterloo, Sadowa, Sedan, 
— great captains, Hannibal, Caesar, Charlemagne, 
Gustavus, Marlborough, Wellington, Napoleon, 

75 



while they stir the blood, strike and fill the 
imagination for a space, yet live only in history, 
and get no enduring hold on after generations, 
even among their own countrymen. Undertaken 
either to effect or resist conquest, such wars, 
once over, the world breathes freer and sets to 
work to repair their ravages. A brilliant page 
the more in history, a deed or two of splendid 
valor worth recounting, another shaft or two to 
gleam in bronze upon the square, — over against 
them, blood wasted, homes desolate, treasure 
spent — that is the end. No hold laid on the 
deep and enduring things that move the world, 
nothing done for truth, justice, liberty or the 
rights of man. Small wonder, then, that no 
nation seeks to perpetuate but rather to efface 
the memory of such a war. Call up before you 
all the great wars of history. What one among 
them all, is commemorated by a national holiday, 
by gay regalia or reverent worship.? Yet this 
America of ours, in its first short century of 
life has passed through two conflicts only, and 
each of them is already marked at the hands of 
63,000,000 people, by national observance, by a 
day set apart, by business forsaken, by jocund or 
by reverent rites. Wonderful indeed is this.? 
And yet more wonderful that it is the sponta- 
neous doing of the people themselves. No ruler 
has commanded it, no edict has enforced, yet so 
peculiarly has it been the people's doing, so a 
part of the people's life has it become, that 
perhaps no man, now a listener, could say when 

76 



Independence Day was not celebrated, or could 
fix its almost dateless origin. 

Our second great war closed, and not long 
after, in that sunnier South-land where our 
armies trampled their victorious way, and where 
too many of our glorious dead were left, some 
Southern women went to mourn their dead. 
The spring comes earlier there, and they had 
plucked the first spring flowers to strew the 
graves they loved, but when that was done, side 
by side with them, touching each other, even, in 
their sleeps, lay the undecked Union boys, and 
with the quick, woman's tenderness, over these, 
too, the flowers were sprinkled. Our North was 
touched by the act and by its spirit, and when 
three years after the saving of the Union, a 
German private, whose name is lost, wrote to 
say that in the fatherland his people were wont 
in the spring to visit the burying grounds and 
place flowers on the graves of their friends and 
relatives, and that this might be a fitting way to 
do honor to the Union dead, that great citizen- 
soldier, John A. Logan, then commander-in- 
chief of the Grand Army, promptly designated 
the first Decoration Day, expressing the hope 
that it would be kept up from year to year, 
as long as one survivor of the war remained to 
honor the memory of his departed comrades. 
Sleep soft, gallant old hero, and have no fear ! 
Their country and yours will never forget these 
glorious dead! A quarter-century has already 
passed since the order of your commander, and 

77 



every year, though your own ranks waste, your 
solemn ceremonial is kept by growing numbers, 
and long after the last comrade has gone to join 
his dead commander, when the last empty sleeve 
shall have told its story out, and the last blue 
coat shall have been folded awa}' forever, while 
you reform your files upon the farther shore, our 
children's children shall still climb the hillsides, 
as today, and with reverent and loving hands, 
shall bring their tears and flowers for these 
outnumbering dead. This is the Nation's day, 
and the Nation shall guard it. Let stores be 
shut, let all noise of machinery be still, that 
nothing may stand between the people and their 
festival. Strew your flowers tenderly, proudly 
as well, let the nation's flag float everywhere, 
and you yourselves march blithely with the old 
step to the old tunes — Memorial it is indeed, but 
festival as well, for this our country was dead 
and is alive again ! 

Today once more the grateful season has come 
round, once more with our reverent flowers we 
have sought God's acres where the sleepers now 
lie so thick that the graves seem almost to grow 
faster than the flowers which fill our hands. 
Once more we have marched and laid our 
wreaths and gone our ways, and the exceeding 
and unique beauty of the observance has sunk 
into our hearts. 

But after all, the question always recurs, why 
does this nation of peace, alone among peoples, 
thus celebrate and perpetuate its strifes .? Why 

78 



does all the world else forget and America 
remember ? To what is this deep difference due ? 
Other wars have been as splendid, other captains 
perhaps as great, other victories as signal and 
complete. Other peoples are as grateful as we, 
are equally struck with bravery, stir as easily to 
enthusiasm. No mere accidents of time or 
place or circumstance have drawn this deep 
division. 

We know at once that this difference must lie 
in some deep reality. However it may be for a 
time, great masses of men cannot be permanently 
held or moved by shows. We know too that it 
must be something fundamental, something that 
underlies common things, as the earth underlies 
all foundations that can be built ; something" too, 
common to all humanity, like the air; something 
at once elemental and universal, whose center is 
in the heart of things, and whose circumference 
touches every man that lives. No less a thing 
than this can hold enduring sway; before such 
a thing, when found, the whole world bows, 
makes holiday, brings garlands and worship. 
All acts done in such a cause are enobled. All 
sharers in such acts do thereby "gentle their 
condition." 

In nature nothing is common or mean, 
because each thing contains within it some part 
of that elemental and native beauty which make 
the world its slave. Are you a lover of this 
uncontained and elemental beauty .-' Then walk 
through the woods, those ''plantations of God 

79 



where is perpetual youth, where a decorum and 
sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and 
the guest sees not how he should tire of them in 
a thousand years;" "study the succession of 
native plants in the pastures and by the road- 
sides, which makes the silent clock by which 
time tells the summer hours." Turn your face 
up to the wonderful dome of day, with its " tent 
of drooping clouds," to the secret night, pavil- 
ioned with gold and stars, to the "azure sky, 
over whose unspotted deeps the winds forever- 
more drive flocks of stormy clouds, and leave no 
wrinkle or stain." 

In all this, indeed, shall bea\ity's infinite grace 
appease and feed the soul ; but to the attentive 
mind she dwells no less in meaner objects. It 
is because of her presence that one never tires 
of the grey of the rocks, of the green of the grass 
or the trees. No landscape ever was, in sun or 
shade, but gave some hint of her immortal grace, 
and never does she appear to man twice in the 
same dress. Some part of her has passed into 
the quiet farm scene, into the cows, the flocks, 
the waving grain. The "frolic architecture of 
the snow" and frost speak of her, along brook 
and river she walks beside us, and the gleam 
from fountain and from falling waters is hers. 
The viewless envelope of air becomes blue and 
beautiful with distance, and with water every- 
where she makes especial holiday. The wayside 
weed is as dainty as the rose. In common rock 
or marble the statue dreams, and waits the 

80 



master's hand to wake it into life. Even the 
stagnant pool, when touched with light, breaks 
into colors and proclaims its kinship with the 
rainbow. 

So true is it of nature, everywhere and always, 
even as the poet says : 

"Thou canst not wave thy staff in air 

Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 

But it carves the bow of beauty there 

And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake." 

The principle of it all is that beauty -^ and the 
love of it — is one of the great primal realities of 
the world, one of the deep things on which the 
world and the spirit of man are built and whatso- 
ever possesses it becomes royal, and in whatever 
object we find it we are in ecstasy, and fall down 
before it and worship it as sovereign. 

So, too, when we pass from nature to man and 
the events of history, there are certain great 
primal and perpetual forces which underlie every- 
thing, which have lived since the world began, 
and have been working for the betterment of 
man. Like the great forces of nature, time 
neither adds to, nor takes from, their strength. 
They know no waste from use, no increase from 
exercise. They were from the beginning, and 
their sum then was the same as it is now. Con- 
served like force, their manifestations change, 
their nature and sovereignty never. There is in 
the affairs of men, a certain moral beauty, 
fitness, right — call it what you will — making 
itself manifest to men and to nations as truth, 

8i 



justice, freedom. Sometimes as all these and 
more, and these are the kingly things, these are 
the things that move men, the only things really 
worth the having. 

In all times and in all lands, the effort of 
selfishness, of greed, of corruption, of tyranny, 
has been to stop the way of these irrestible 
forces. The pages of history are red with such 
attempts and sometimes they have seemed to be 
successful. For generations, nay for centuries, 
men have shut their eyes and stopped their ears 
against them, and only here and there, a brave 
and lonely soul has fed the torch, and passed it 
on to the after generations, but whenever 
humanity has once turned its face towards them, 
they have shown themselves to be God-like, and 
have filled the souls of men with the divine 
ecstasy. Once having them, men will never let 
go their hold upon them, but will give up all else 
for them, strip themselves of wealth, of home, of 
friends, to have them ; if need be, they will fight 
for them, will even die for them, as did they 
who sleep in our soldiers' cemeteries, and we 
who live to enjoy what they ha\'e given us, will 
bless their memory for it forever. 

It is with reference to these great and endur- 
ing things that the acts of men and nations are 
to be judged. No act done in their furtherance 
can remain ignoble, no sharer in that act, how- 
ever humble, can ever be base or mean, for the 
stream of this great moral force has poured 
through him, he has become for the time 

82 



co-worker with God himself, and somewhat of 
the Divine must ever after wrap him round. 
All that man ever does that is worth the doing, 
he does by drawing to himself these unseen 
powers and losing himself in their resistless 
currents. When he does this, the action be- 
comes memorable, a strange grace invests him, 
and he speaks and acts as if inspired by a God. 

So is it with the thinker. Socrates stood for 
whole days and nights together in one spot, 
motionless, unheedful of weather, without food, 
without sleep, communing with himself, listen- 
ing, as he said, to the voice of the God within. 

Emerson says, "When I watch that flowing 
river of thought, which out of regions I see not, 
pours for a season its stream into me, I see that 
I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised 
spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire 
and look up and put myself in the attitude of 
reception, but from some alien energy the visions 
come." 

All deep thinking is lonely, rare as well, and 
the reward of vigils. Feed the soul only with 
the greatest things, with the sea, with the stars, 
with the streaming wind, with truth, then be 
patient and the God will come. 

The life of the religious ascetic, of the hermit 
in his cave ; of Stylites upon his pillar, is their 
homage paid to the same great law — a mis- 
directed effort, by isolation from all little things, 
to get closer to the great things of earth, the 
heart of nature and the heart of man. 

83 



So the poet may sing sweetly enough on 
common themes, but it is only when he catches 
the great undcr-harmonies of nature, gives up 
his verse and himself to these wonderful world 
voices, letting them pipe through him, that he 
becomes indeed the wind-harp of heaven and like 

" Music by the night-wind sent 

Through strings of some sweet instrument," 

his verse arrests us, our very hearts dance to his 
piping, and we will leave all, forget all, and 
follow his divine song to the earth's end, 

" Across the hills and far away, 

Beyond their utmost purple rim ; " 

nay, like the fabled Eurydice to whom Orpheus 
piped, back even from immortality ! 

So of the reformer, whose thought is stirred 
by the wrongs of his fellow-men, and who goes 
forth to uproot ancient evils. Invisible forces 
feed and nourish him, deep and secret springs of 
power are his, and, weaponed thus, he dares to 
speak the brave word today, though he face 
death for it tomorrow. 

" Before the monstrous wrong he sets him down — 
One man against a stone-walled city of sin. 
For centuries those walls have been a-building ; 
Smooth porphyry, they slope and coldly glass 
The flying storm and wheeling sun. No chink. 
No crevice lets the thinnest arrow in. 
He fights alone, and from the cloudy ramparts 
A thousand evil faces gibe and jeer him. 
Let him lie down and die ; what is the right, 
And where is the justice, in a world like this? 



Bttt by and by, earth shakes herself impatient ; 
And down, in one great roar of ruin, crash 
Watch-tower and citadel and battlements. 
When the red dust has cleared, the lonely soldier 
Stands with strange thoughts beneath the friendly 
stars. ' ' 

So with the orator. It is only in those sub- 
lime moments when he sets his theme deep in 
the underflow of the silent world-forces, truth, 
justice, liberty, that what he says is worth the 
hearing, and his words move irresistibly. Then 
only does he forget himself and let his message 
to men speak through him; all mere rhetoric 
drops away from him, all tricks to gain applause 
are justly despised, and then all things do his 
bidding, all the deep moral forces that were from 
the beginning, and surge and play unseen about 
us, stream through the speech like music through 
the pipe; then, indeed, his utterance is golden, 
his language becomes picturesque and noble, his 
gesture fit, his thought crystalline and imperial, 
his whole speech "lyrical and sweet and univer- 
sal, like the rising of the wind." 

Such a man the imagination should enrich as 
if there were no other ; to him memory should 
open all her cabinets and archives, science all 
her length and breadth, poetry her splendor and 
joy, and the august circles of eternal law; and 
this not because the moral power and splendor 
of his theme "stooped to him and became his 
property, but because he rose to it and followed 
its circuits." 

85 



But if all this be true of those who only think 
or sing or speak things, how much more is it 
true of the hero who does things ? If it be brave 
and noble to write or speak for truth, for liberty, 
for the rights of man, how much more to peril 
friends, home, family, life itself, for their sweet 
sake ? It is not the mere act of dying bravely 
that makes the hero, for that may be done under 
the hangman's noose, the headsman's axe, but 
the true hero is baptized by his cause; he is 
glorious because his cause is glorious. This it is 
that makes 

"That swift validity in noble veins, 

Of choosing danger and disdaining shame, 

Of being set on flame 

By the pure fire that flies all contact base, 

But wraps its chosen with angelic might, 

These are imperishable gains, 

Sure as the sun, medicinal as light, 

These hold great futures in their lusty reins, 

And certify to earth a new imperial race." 

Such a hero unseen forces gird with power. 
" Nature bends her lines of grandeur and grace" 
about him, violets nod to him, the great hills 
beckon him, the rose is sweet for him, stars 
shine for him, waters flash and fall for him, and 
the approving sky seems to throw its whole 
magnificent arch for him alone. 

Now in all these broad fields of power, there is 
no man so humble but he can bear his part. I 
hold that every man has in him certain reserves 
of greatness which can be drawn on when the 

86 



great moment comes. The divine soul which is 
in all, is also in every part, and can be made to 
respond to the wise and skilful touch, as music 
to make its way through the stops of a flute, or 
as light only is needed to reveal in every work of 
nature its elemental and related beauty. There 
is in ev^ery man, as with fine insight the poet 
has said, 

"A seed of sunshine that doth leaven 

Our earthly dulness with the beams of stars, 

And glorifies our clay 
With light from fountains elder than the Day ; 
A conscience more divine than we, 
A gladness fed with secret tears, 
A vexing forward-reaching sense, 
Of some more noble permanence ; 

A light across the sea 
Which haunts the soul and will not let it be, 
Still glimmering from the heights of undegenerate 
years." 

Without the cooperation of the people, no 
reform, moral or intellectual, was ever possible, 
and if there were not that divine something in 
every man which, when reached, recognized and 
obeyed the behest of a sovereign principle, that 
cooperation could never have been had. 

But great masses of men, like iron, are slow to 
heat, and till they have been touched by some 
elemental flame, cannot be trusted to do the 
work of steel. Therefore it is, that with nations 
as with individuals, all the things best worth 
doing or thinking have been done in supreme 
and rare periods of moral or intellectual uplifting, 

87 



when some great baptismal flame wraps and 
purifies the nation, making dark things clear, 
and some great primal principle is seen stamped 
in blood and fire upon the people's heart. 

Such times come, the souls of men take fire, 
their thoughts and lives spread broad and deep, 
and deeds of inspired courage and passion are 
easy. 

And now we know why it is that while Europe 
is silent at Sedan and Waterloo, and her wars of 
conquest are left uncommemorated, yet for our 
own great War of the Rebellion, each year when 
the spring comes back, this whole nation of ours 
keeps holiday, and breaks into unique and uni- 
versal flower-time to crown our dead who are no 
more. It is because our war was one of those 
baptismal times, when man got fast hold on 
realities, because our soldiers fought and died, 
not for things that live for a day, but for 
deep and abiding truths on which the world is 
built, for justice, for freedom, for the rights of 
man. Men commemorate and can never forget 
your deeds, because you harnessed yourselves to 
those irresistible powers, because those celestial- 
world voices sang through your sometimes 
unconscious lute, because something of that 
elemental surge flowed beneath you and upbore 
you to necessary triumph. Such moments make 
all that is worth the having in history one, all 
the past and all the future are focussed in the 
one sublime instant, and when the shining 
deed is done, you have linked yourselves im- 



perishably with Thermopylae and Marathon and 
Runny mede. 

In a world where so much is fugitive, where 
the poppy of oblivion is so soon sprinkled over 
even noble names, where all things but come 
into being, and forthwith cease to be, happy are 
they, the living and the dead, who have passed 
through the gateway of imperishable deeds into 
the secure regions of immortality. 



89 



JAMES G. BLAINE 
Memorial Address, January JO, l8gj 

Four hundred years have just closed since 
Columbus opened America to the world, and 
while the eyes of all nations have been turned 
towards the noble ceremonials of that event, 
even in the expectant hush between the prelude 
and the pageant, there have sounded solemn 
dirges for the dead. While the frosts have yet 
glittered on our New England homes, Death, 
which knows no season, has found a time for 
harvest, and huge and golden grain has fallen 
beneath his sickle. Before the first month of 
the new century has closed, a loved and honored 
member of the Supreme Court of this State, a 
justice of the Supreme Court of the United 
States, an ex-President of the United States, 
another jurist from private life, versatile in the 
law, a picturesque and striking figure among the 
great generals of the war— all have passed over 
unto the greater number. 

The Church, too, has been called to mourn 
her venerable Bishop, in whom all seemly virtues 
went hand in hand with a pure spirit and a noble 
eloquence. His consecration, his catholic spirit 
which outstretched all creeds, has made not the 

91 



church alone, but humanity, the better for his 
living. And now, as if all this would not suffice 
the greedy Harvester, comes this newest, most 
personal loss in the death of our neighbor 
and our friend, the foremost man of all his 
countrymen! 

It is fitting that in this city, his chosen home, 
in this church of which he was for more than 
thirty years a worshipper and a member, this 
simple burial service should be said, this last 
loving tribute spoken. 

Forty years ago he came to us from his native 
state of Pennsylvania, and in that time his 
growing fame has become the chiefest glory of 
our city and our State. He was but twenty- 
three years old when he established his home 
here in 1853, but those who knew him tell us 
that he was even then of striking presence. 
Slender and rather tall, attired in the fashion of 
the time in blue swallowtail coat with brass 
buttons, with bold, flashing eye and an eager 
courage of manner, endowed with an indomitable 
energy and an iron constitution that scorned 
fatigue, the seeds of a great future were already 
there. 

Though his powers of oratory were of later 
growth, he had even then that alert and rapid 
mind, that quickness to comprehend, assimilate 
and reproduce, that irresistible charm of manner 
and that wonderful memory for facts and faces, 
which were the foundations on which he built 
his later fame. 

92 



Of his later life we must speak sparingly. 
This is not the time or the presence to meas- 
ure coldly his achievements or his intellectual 
strength. Mr. Blaine was a many-sided man. 
Dead at the age of sixty-two, when he should 
have been at the zenith of his powers, he lived 
not long but much. Life is measured not by 
years but by achievement, and for nearly twenty 
years, in office and out of it, his has been the 
central figure of the Republic ! Throwing him- 
self earliest into the Fremont campaign of 1856, 
he stepped upon the stage of American politics 
at a time when great figures were traversing it, 
and when the passion of the play was at its 
height. Webster and Clay and Calhoun had 
indeed played their parts and gone, but redoubt- 
able leaders filled their places; for the South, 
Davis and Toombs and Benjamin; for the North, 
Sumner and Fessenden and Hale and Lovejoy, 
Thaddeus Stevens, the great commoner, Crit- 
tenden, Bingham and Conkling, and between 
the two, Douglas and Winter Davis, and Chas. 
Francis Adams. The struggle over "Bleeding 
Kansas," had already fired the nation's blood, 
and the giant debate was not far away wherein 
Abraham Lincoln, as the then unknown cham- 
pion of freedom, was to cross swords with the 
renowned Douglas in the eyes of all the land. 
The nomination of Lincoln, to whose support 
Mr. Blaine's personal influence brought part of 
the Maine delegation, his election, the secession 
of the South, and the inspired era of the war 

93 



followed fast on one another's heels. All of 
these he saw and a part of them he was. 

Thrown thus into times which were them- 
selves an inspiration, trained under the eye of 
that masterful leader, Thaddeus Stevens, lis- 
tening to the fervid eloquence of Hale and 
Bingham, studying the classic ornateness of 
Sumner, and the keen thrust and parry of 
Fessenden, equipped by nature, as he was, with 
stored and ready resources, small wonder that 
the youthful statesman (he was but thirty-two 
when he entered Congress) grew apace in power 
and effectiveness as a debater. 

Bred first to the art of writing, his power of 
speech had remained unknown to him till, on 
his return to Augusta from the convention of 
1856 which had nominated Fremont, the insis- 
tence of friends brought him to his feet to make 
report of the doings of that convention. Sur- 
prised and embarrassed at first, he advanced to 
confidence and even fervor at the end. From 
that time on he threw himself ardently into 
public debate. On the great questions of slavery 
he was early matched in the Maine Legislature 
with the most formidable legal mind then in 
Maine, Mr. Gould of Thomaston, himself a 
man of imperious intellect, who asked and gave 
no quarter in controversy, and Mr. Blaine had 
come off the admitted victor. 

In debate Mr. Blaine was always a dreaded 
antagonist, never staying long on the defensive 
and terrible in attack. Quick to see and expose 

94 



the error or fallacy of an opponent, unquench- 
able in courage, swift and keen in retort, with 
wit, anecdote, illustration, history ready at call, 
full of resources and of unexpected turns and 
flashes which blinded his adversary, the ablest 
debaters felt the peril of his Damascus edge. 

As an orator in the Senate and upon the 
platform, Mr. Blaine held and swayed his audi- 
ence, not so much by the purely intellectual 
quality of his speech, as by the intense domina- 
ting personality of the man who spoke. In his 
extemporaneous speeches one will find no pas- 
sages which could be singled out, like Webster's, 
for their incomparable splendor ; he had nothing 
of the subtle, intellectual quality of Calhoun, 
nothing of the philosophic sweep of Burke or 
the elevation of Chatham, nothing of Sumner's 
learning and ornateness, nothing of Fessenden's 
passionless logic, little of the eloquence of 
Pinckney or Winter Davis, but his sentences 
were terse and strong, put plainly what he 
wished to say, and transfixed his opponent like a 
javelin. He seldom used mere graces of style, 
his speeches show little imagination or that 
poetic touch which is oftenest allied with elo- 
quence ; he rarely condensed a whole argument 
into one luminous metaphor as did Bacon or 
Emerson, but he put his thought into speech so 
plain that all should see and carry it away, he 
overbore the opposing argument with facts, 
pouring these out sometimes in an impetuous 
torrent, till the hearer was fascinated, convinced, 

95 



compelled by the towering will-power of the 
man. 

As a parliamentarian Mr. Blaine was unsur- 
passed, if not unequalled, in America. His 
presence was commanding, his voice resonant, 
his temper even. He was eminently courteous 
and fair, but he ahvays respected the dignity of 
debate, and when his gavel fell, the most turbu- 
lent House knew it was under the sway of a 
master. His decisions were rapid and adhered 
to, and his instantaneous memory for precedent 
made it difficult to find him unprepared. 

But whatever rank history may assign to Mr. 
Blaine as an orator or statesman, in one thing, 
at least, he towers head and shoulders above all 
who have ever lived in America, as an inspirer 
of enthusiasm, as the incomparable leader of 
men! No American ever attracted so strongly, 
and kept so long, the loyalty and love of such 
large masses of his countrymen. It may well be 
that we shall never see again in these prosaic 
centuries so much of the mediaeval hero, such a 
belted knight among men. The people felt 
instinctively his sagacity to lead, his masterful 
resources, his intuition for their needs, his 
knightly courage, and, when he set his lance in 
rest, they followed him as the men of old might 
follow Launcelot or Richard, the Lion-Hearted, 
careless whether to the tourney or the wars. 

Wherever he was, in the Senate or the 
drawing room, he was the commanding presence, 
and his overmastering personality laid a spell on 

96 



men. In conversation his eye flashed, the whole 
man kindled and became at once alert and 
intense. When he spoke, he spoke impetuously, 
at times imperiously, as a man may who believes 
what he says, and by the very intensity of his 
belief overbears opposition. 

The closing years of his life were spent in 
literature and diplomacy, and, until the distress- 
ful strokes of fortune smote him so heavily, 
there is no period in his career so reposeful and 
yet so fruitful of greatness. Years and the 
soberness of power had brought him intellectual 
sweetness, a juster sense of the proportions of 
things, and something of that rare vision into 
the future which is statesmanship. To this 
period belongs his most enduring work. His 
literary labor is distinguished by its impartiality, 
by its just judgments of men, by its mag- 
nanimous tributes to personal and political 
opponents. His language is always fitly chosen 
and his style lucid and sonorous. In his eulogy 
on Garfield he has left us a classic, a very pearl 
of English, fit to rank with the noblest things of 
the masters. 

All this while, too, was growing in his mind 
the great conception of Pan-America, of which 
reciprocity was but a phase, and by which the 
future will largely measure his creative work, 
the conception of binding together through 
commerce and friendship and mutual respect 
this whole continent of nations. 

Here is the central thought and fruit of all 

97 



Mr. Blaine's life and genius, — his intense Ameri- 
canism. Others have been as great and perhaps 
greater than he, in their several lines. Webster 
was the great expounder of the Constitution, 
Stevens the great commoner, Patrick Henry 
the great orator ; Mr. Blaine was something of 
all these, but he was also something more than 
all of them — he was and will remain the great 
American ! 

But it is of Mr. Blaine the neighbor and the 
friend that we would speak the last loving word. 
Many-sided and magnanimous, he harbored no 
revenges, was incapable of malice and loved 
his friends. As a friend he was kind and 
sympathetic, he had a tender heart as a husband 
and father, to the poor his hand was ever open. 

Like all great souls, he loved to drink from 
nature's imperishable fountains and would not 
willingly be long away from her and her deep re- 
freshments. Walks by the streams and through 
the forests, more often in later years long drives 
past the changing charm of lake and plain and 
mountain, were to him an inspiration! In his 
last years he clung to his summer home by the 
sea, to which he turned each year with touching 
wistfulness, that its great waves and its salt, 
splendid air might bring some touch of healing 
to his wasted health. 

But in the earlier days, before all memories of 
Augusta brought him the inexpressible sadness 
of a broken circle, he loved best to take his pas- 
sing guest up the familiar hillsides of Augusta, 

98 



and point out where, below him, the valley of 
the Kennebec dreamed its dream of beauty, 
where the city slept, and the solemn river, and 
where his old home was, by the State House 
dome. 

Many an hour and lovingly would he linger by 
these familiar scenes, and in the old happy days, 
before thieving Death had slipped so often into 
his household, when the plain old house, now 
mute, was filled with merry guests, and wife 
and cherished sons, now dead, and fair young 
daughters stood about him, and read or talked 
beneath the apple trees, it was, indeed, a gracious 
thing to see, and there was no happier home in 
all this land. 

But now the latter days have come, when we 
must take leave of our friend, for he must go 
hence. Already his day is far spent; morning 
is over-past, the noon has slipped into the after- 
noon, and at the age of sixty-two, while his life 
should yet ride some hours high in the horizon, 
lo! the shadows gather, the great change is 
upon him, and painlessly, with one last bitter 
shudder of the riven tenement. Night takes him 
into her arms, and wraps him about with the 
softness and silence of her stars. 

In the beautiful words which he himself spoke 
over the body of the dead Garfield : " Let us 
think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning 
which only the rapt and parting soul may know. 
Let us believe that in the silence of the receding 



99 



world he heard the great waves breaking on a 
farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted 
brow the breath of the eternal morning." 



loo 



CHIEF JUSTICE WISWELL 
Memorial Address, June 8, igoy 

May it please the Court : At times we are 
strikingly reminded that close beside the borders 
of life, set with all its blooms, flows the river of 
death into whose forbidding waters no man may 
step and then return, and no man who has once 
entered may send answer back from the further 
shore. When it comes to one who is frail with 
sickness or weary with the hardships of life, the 
fingers of death are soft and even welcome. 
But when it overtakes, as it did here, the strong 
man in harness, it must give us pause in order 
that we may cast a glance at the life, at the 
character, at the career of him who has left us. 

Chief Justice Wiswell passed from us in the 
full tide of life and honor. It is not here that 
any just appreciation in detail of his services, 
his public worth, or even his private character, 
be said; but we are met here as his associates 
and friends to place upon his grave the sweet 
tribute of friendly recognition. Of those nearer 
qualities and companionships which form so 
much of the sweeter aspects of life he was full, 
fruitful, yielding back in generous measure more 
than he could receive. 

For many years he was my close friend, and 



he was the close friend of many upon this Bench 
and in this auditory. We knew and loved those 
brave personal qualities which must endear a 
man to those who come in touch with himi. He 
had a rare ingenuousness of spirit which added 
greatly to the charm which all felt in his 
personality. He was a true man, a sincere man, 
open, frank, almost like a child in his frankness 
of feeling and expression, his directness, his 
sincerity, his simplicity. His simplicity was but 
the insignia of his greatness. 

In his work at the bar, where he had an 
extensive though perhaps not a commanding 
practice, and especially upon the bench, where 
of course in later years, we knew him best, he 
had the qualities, many of the qualities of a great 
judge. I think he was characterized deeply by 
a love for justice, a passion, innate, unobtrusive, 
but powerful for justice. And he had a rare 
faculty for attaining it in the given cause. He 
had, at the same time the gravest respect for 
law, and with him I think it may fairly be said it 
was justice informed by a knowledge of the law, 
and respect for lawiUumined by justice. 

He had a singularly clear insight into the 
facts of a cause. He penetrated easily through 
the entanglements of fact. He saw his way 
rapidly and clearly to the end and did not 
hesitate to cleave to the very mark, either in 
pronouncing the principles of law or in reaching 
the just end. In his decisions, in his opinions, 
he made no aim at literary finish. His style 



never flamed with the fires of imagination. But 
he had a power of ahnost crystal statement, of 
strong, vigorous logic, which enabled him to cut 
his way through unmeaning technicality down 
to the deep-lying principles of the cause. 

He himself has perhaps best expressed his 
own view of the duty of the bench, and held up 
at the same time, perhaps unconsciously, a clear 
mirror of his own life and powers in the remarks 
that he made at the banquet given Chief Justice 
Peters, where he declared that the true office of 
the bench was the "search for fundamental truth." 
True it is, as this court so well illustrates by its 
own practice, that the search for underlying 
truth is the highest function possible to any 
tribunal. And I think it can be justly said, and 
that the members of the bar of this State and of 
the bench will concur in the saying, that his 
conscious effort was a search for the underlying 
truth ; and when he found it he meant to hold it 
up and to sustain it against all odds. He did 
not suffer his mind to be swayed from it by 
aught else. He minded no popular clamor. He 
minded not the voices of the majority. He was 
content to dwell in the serene minority with 
truth and with the right. And that, may it 
please the court, in these days, I would suggest 
is the great and commanding feature of his life 
work and of his personal character. Aside from 
its endearing traits, aside from its personal 
charm, its sweetness, its attractiveness to friends, 
measured from the intellectual standpoint, I 

103 



believe the fearless courage of the man was the 
one central characteristic about which all else 
grouped and subordinated itself. 

I heard the other evening an impressive 
address delivered before a dinner of the bar of 
New York by the retiring senior justice of the 
Circuit court of the United States for the 
district of New York, in which he said with 
great impressiveness and with great truth, that 
the final refuge of all rights of property, of all 
rights of the individual, was in the courts. 
They alone upbear the protecting shield of the 
constitution, and encroaching and pernicious 
legislation will, in the end, run riot, unless they 
finally interpose this sheltering arm. To their 
courage in opposing, if the truth requires them 
to oppose, the feelings of the moment ; to their 
boldness in asserting the constitutional require- 
ments and sustaining them, the people look, all 
men look for the final administration of this 
government. 

And in these days when it is easy to be brave 
in the institution of measures that are sure to 
command the assent of the majority, when so 
often in public life men shrink from opposing 
what they fear they will be outnumbered in 
opposing, the bravery of the chief justice, the 
dauntlessness with which he hewed to the line 
as he saw it, is the trait I believe most needed 
and most lacking in public life. 

He possessed it, he exercised it, and he did so 
to the end. And in placing before himself as a 

104 



lawyer that standard and ideal of the search for 
underlying truth, he placed himself in accord 
with that which every man in every calling must 
obey if he would attain any measure of great- 
ness. Judicially, it is obvious. It is no less so 
in other arts, in other professions, in other 
careers. The man of science is no true scientist 
if he does not above all else place this search 
for the underlying truth, rejecting error. The 
philosopher works skilfully or unskilfully in 
proportion as both his analyses and his syntheses 
rest upon and reveal the underlying truth of 
things. And even the poet, with whatever 
sprays of fancy he may adorn his thought, fails 
as a great poet unless his verse is but the pipe 
through which the fundamental truths of nature 
and humanity may musically stream. It is only 
when he opens his verse so that the winds and 
the sky and the resounding sea may pour 
through it, even as music through great organ 
pipes, that he sings in harmony with those 
underlying forces which make the poem and the 
poet great. 

In judicial life Judge Wiswell perceived these 
things and acted on them, and we are here today 
to do honor to what deserves honor, to that high, 
commanding hewing to principle and that daunt- 
less courage which dares support principle 
against all odds. 

And now, may it please the court, our sorrow- 
ful duty is ended. We await but the word of 



105 



the court, the word of his associates, the final 
word. I remember in the old Saxon story life 
was imaged to be the passage of a bird through 
an old Saxon banquet hall. When the logs 
were piled high and kindled, and the lords were 
gathered together round the banquet table, forth 
from the snows outside, a bird flew through the 
open door, tarried a moment, and flew away 
upon the opposite side. Its stay within was 
pleasant. For the moment it felt not cold or 
bitter winter weather. But the moment was 
brief. In the twinkling of an eye it had passed 
and its passage was from winter to winter. 
"Such," said the old Saxon bard, "such, O king, 
is the life of man on earth." But were it per- 
mitted us to have a wider knowledge and a 
deeper insight, might it not well be that our 
passage here was rather from an immortality 
that had passed through the shadows and 
unrealities of life into an immortality that is to 
come.? There is not only exquisite poetry, but 
deep philosophy in the thought of the poet : 

" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." 
But now today, in this belated spring-time, 
when the splendor is fast coming to the grass, 
the freshness to the flower, with hints and 
bcckonings of immortality all about us, our 
feeling at the end in the death of our beloved 
friend, is a deep sense of personal loss. We can 
only say, at the last, and feci with the great 
Poet of the Lakes: 



io6 



"The rainbow comes and goes, 
And lovely is the rose ; 
The moon doth with delight 
Look round her when the heavens are bare ; 
Waters on a starry night are beavitiful and fair ; 
The sunshine is a glorious birth ; 
But yet I know, where'er I go, 
That there hath passed away a glory from the 
earth." 



107 



ADDRESS TO THE MAINE BAR 

Delivered at Aiigtista, February I J, igoy 

This is an era of agitation ; and from agitation, 
though sometimes excessiv^e, progress results. 
We are here to assist and at the same time to 
temper by such wisdom and conservatism as we, 
the members of the Bar of the State of Maine, 
can bring, the path of that progress, — to see that 
reaction does not dip too far away from action ; 
and I think the riiembers of the Bar of this State 
are deeply conscious that they are the ones who 
should feel, and keenest feel, the broad fact that 
there are times when the finest action is to 
refuse to act. There are times when the highest 
type of moral courage is a noble abstinence from 
action, when the easy path is that of restless- 
ness; and, in times like these, where the only 
virtues that are praised are the virtues of unrest, 
I believe it is one of the special functions of the 
Bar of this State and of all the other states to 
see to it that a wise self-control should govern 
their great influence. I am not, therefore, one 
of those who think that the normal state of 
society is that of unrest. There are undoubtedly 
activities which are normal, and which neces- 
sarily accompany the healthy and growing man, 
but there is also a morbid activity which is but 

109 



the restlessness of disease, or the inflammation 
of passion, or the easy yielding to those lines 
which are of least resistance ; and in these days 
when there are silent revolutions, not one but 
many, in progress under our very eyes, when the 
most noted characteristic, perhaps, of the age, 
of this country at least, is the tendency to 
supersede all delegated authority, to reject the 
trained assistance of those representative men, 
who, if properly chosen may well be thought to 
stand for the better things and the wider knowl- 
edge of life — it seems to me, and I would 
venture to lay that suggestion before the Bar of 
this State, that our great influence — because in 
the aggregate it is of tremendous weight — that 
our great influence should be thrown on the side 
of a wise reserve. 

Great reserves of power that are stored in the 
lakes most benefit the land when they are 
distributed through the rivers and the streams of 
delegated power. The great central reservoir, 
that power which ultimately reposes in the 
people, is to be used with a wise reserve, lest 
instead of irrigation we get inundation ; and yet, 
though that be true, and though the forces of 
reaction sweep from one extreme always to the 
opposite extreme, it is equally true that we 
should not retard, but should continually en- 
deavor to promote true progress. But true 
progress seldom lies in either extreme, — rather 
in that even path which takes its way undeterred 
by fear and regardless of consequences. I am. 



therefore, not one of those who place too much 
faith in the constant necessity of change, either 
in law or in procedure. But yet that should 
not prevent us from keeping our minds clear and 
open to those reforms which do satisfy the 
reason, — those demands and those requirements 
and changes which the experience of added years 
has shown are useful and which open up wider 
paths for the better doing of those things that 
ought to be done. 

Now, as I have suggested, there are three 
things which, to my mind, in addition to the 
other topics that have been here outlined during 
the afternoon and evening sessions, — three 
things, each of which, to my mind, would serve 
to better the conditions of legal practice, and I 
will venture to submit to you these three things, 
because all of them have been founded upon my 
own personal experience, and that experience, I 
have no doubt, is by no means peculiar to myself, 
but is shared with many of the lawyers here 
present. 

In the first place, under our practice, after 
verdict, the case goes to the Law Court, either 
upon exception or upon motion. Whether it 
goes upon one or the other, the Law Court has 
power only to set aside the verdict rendered, and 
order a new trial. 

I would beg the careful consideration of the 
members of this Association to another state of 
things which will be found to exist in the neigh- 
boring state of New Hampshire. Having had 



occasion to practice under the procedure of that 
state (and under its statutes) — and I beHeve 
in all essential particulars its constitutional pro- 
visions are the same as ours — I suggest a careful 
study of the New Hampshire procedure in that 
particular, and its adoption in the State of 
Maine. 

The point that I desire to bring to your 
attention is this : There a motion for a new trial 
as against the evidence can only be addressed to 
the presiding judge. I do not for a moment 
recommend any change in our practice in that 
respect. But when the case is closed, if, for 
instance, counsel for the defense believes that the 
facts, as proved up to that time, make no case in 
law, then he can move the presiding judge to 
order a verdict for the defendant. If that 
motion is denied, he takes his exception, and 
upon that exception he goes to the Law Court 
with his whole evidence ; and, after full argument 
before the Law Court, if the Law Court in its 
judgment says that there is no case as a matter 
of law, then on this exception it exercises the 
power, at its option, not merely to order a new 
trial by the jury, but, if it sees fit, it directs final 
judgment for the defendant. 

While I have not had occasion to test the 
converse of that practice, I fancy that under a 
proper case the same rule applies to a verdict 
moved in behalf of the plaintiff. Of course this 
would not so often occur. 

Now that would accomplish what.? In case 



the Court exercises its power, and orders a final 
judgment, that of course prevents the case from 
being re-tried when the Supreme law tribunal of 
the State has finally pronounced upon it, and 
said that as a matter of law there was no case 
there. 

I had the impression at the time of this 
address that the exercise of this power by the 
Law Court of New Hampshire was based in 
part, or in whole, upon statute. In order to 
verify this impression, I have written to one of 
the leading lawyers of New Hampshire and find 
that the New Hampshire practice rests but 
slightly, if at all, upon statute, but has been 
evolved by the court itself as the logical and 
necessary result of common law conclusions. 

Such it seems is the understanding of the 
New Hampshire Bar, and this understanding 
would appear to receive the sanction of the 
Court from the reasoning applied in the case of 
Ordzvay vs. Railroad Company, 69 N. H. 429, 
where the opinion was rendered by the late 
Chief Justice Blodgett. 

The line of legal reasoning on which the New 
Hampshire practice rests is simple, and would 
seem suiificient. If, when the evidence ends, 
whether at the close or at the end of the plain- 
tiff's or of the defendant's testimony, it is found, 
as matter of law, that there is no legal evidence 
sufficient to sustain a verdict for the plaintiff, 
then counsel for the defendant moves that a 
verdict be directed in the defendant's favor, and 

113 



if this motion is denied, he takes his exception 
to the ruHng of law, and if the Law Court on 
final argument decide that this motion should 
have been granted, it simply sustains the excep- 
tion and at the same time makes good the doing 
of what should have been done below by ordering 
final judgment for the defendant. 

In Ordivay vs. Railroad, before cited, the 
New Hampshire Court thus answers any objec- 
tion that the practice adopted vv'ould be an 
encroachment on the constitutional right of jury 
trial. It says: 

"Nor" (in giving the effect of this method of 
procedure) "when the facts would not authorize 
the jury to find a verdict for the plaintiff, or if 
the court would set it aside if so found as con- 
trary to evidence, is there to be apprehended any 
danger of encroachment upon the plaintiff's 
rights, or abridgement of the prerogatives of the 
jury. Whether a verdict or non-suit be ordered, 
no right of the plaintiff is taken from him, if his 
rights be regarded in their just extent. He 
cannot rightfully claim a verdict of the jury if he 
fails to produce evidence which will legally 
sustain it, and it is only when he does so fail that 
he is precluded from submitting his case to their 
consciences; nor is there any violation of the 
salutary rule (which is nowhere given a more 
extensive application than in this jurisdiction), 
that to questions of law the judges are to 
respond, and to questions of fact, the jury, 
because it is purely a question of law whether, 

114 



upon a given state of facts, the plaintiff is 
entitled to recover." 

At the same time, the New Hampshire Court, 
in its discretion, may and does direct a new trial 
by the jury if it deems that justice so requires. 

The only statute in New Hampshire which 
seems to bear upon the subject, as I am advised, 
is the following, found in Public Statutes of New 
Hampshire, chap. 204, sec. 15 : 

" Upon the determination of the questions 
arising upon a bill of exceptions or case reserved, 
such judgment shall be rendered or order made 
at the law term as the case requires ; and if 
judgment has been rendered in the case it may 
be vacated as if rendered by mistake, and such 
further proceedings may be had therein as to 
law and justice appertain." 

It will probably be found, on examination of 
our own statutes, that power equally effective, so 
far as statutes went, has been conferred upon 
our own Court. If not, a simple change of 
statute would effect it. 

The reform advocated here would seem, there- 
fore, to be in the hands of the Court itself. 
There would seem to be no legal or constitu- 
tional objection to the adoption of this procedure 
by the Law Court of this State, while its 
importance seems to be urged by the logic of 
common law and as the only means of giving full 
effect and authority to the deliberate determina- 
tion of the Law Court. 

Now, under our practice, our Law Court not 

115 



exercising that power which it does exercise in 
New Hampshire, in one case where I myself was 
personally engaged, — and I use this merely as an 
illustration — the case came back and was tried 
before four different juries, and each time on 
motion the case was again taken to the Law 
Court with the same result, "Verdict set aside; 
new trial granted," until finally at the fourth 
trial before a jury the presiding justice ordered a 
verdict for the defendant in accordance with the 
opinion of the full court in the same case 
delivered at the three trials previous. 

Mr. S. S. Brown of Waterville: You say 
that was in this State .-' 

President Baker: That was in this State 
and in this county. 

Now, to my mind, the question of reform in 
judicial or legal procedure is based upon this 
principle : That parties should have all unneces- 
sary expense spared them. There was an 
expense that was not only unnecessary, but, as 
all unnecessary things are, wasteful. The final 
result was the same as if final judgment for the 
defendant had been directed by the Law Court 
in the first instance, as would have been done, 
undoubtedly, under the New Hampshire prac- 
tice; — but yet both parties, plaintiff as well as 
defendant, were put to the great and needless 
expense of four jury trials and three arguments 
in the Law Court before that final judgment was 
reached, or could be reached under our statute. 
I commend to the consideration of this Associa- 

ii6 



tion the study and respectful recommendation 
to the Bench of the New Hampshire plan. 

The second thing, which I also discovered, as 
one usually does, by personal experience, — in the 
United States Courts, after a final decision is 
rendered by the Court of Appeals, whatever that 
may be, that decision, although fresh from the 
pen of the Bench, must be held in abeyance for 
a certain specific time — I believe under the 
United States practice it is thirty days — during 
which time it is open to counsel on either side 
who may feel aggrieved by the decision to 
reconsider and reverse its own finding. 

Now of course in the ordinary case that is 
absolutely useless, because, after the Court has 
maturely considered the case and reached the 
result which it desired to reach, it would abide 
by that result. It is not for the ordinary case, 
but for the extraordinary case that that ambula- 
tory decision is provided, because in some cases 
the Court may have inadvertently fallen into 
error. It may be an error of law, even of funda- 
mental law, and such an error as when brought 
to the attention of the Court will at once and 
necessarily be rectified, and the result reversed 
or modified. The same practice prevails in 
many of the states. To my knowledge, it does 
in New Hampshire, and I have the impression 
it does in Massachusetts. 

Now I have this case in mind, where a decision 
had been rendered by the Law Court, a verdict 
having been obtained favorable to my client in 

117 



the Court below after a very extended jury trial. 
The case was taken to the Law Court by the 
opposing party on motion, and under the motion, 
no exceptions having been taken to the law, — at 
the Law Court the point was sought to be made 
that the verdict should not stand because the 
law would not warrant it, notwithstanding the 
facts proved at the trial, and assuming that they 
would have warranted the verdict as a matter of 
fact. The Law Court kept that case under 
advisement for I think about three years, and 
when it decided, sustained all the various legal 
contentions upon which the verdict was based 
except one, and that was the fundamental propo- 
sition of the whole case, and was based, as I had 
conceived, on practically a legal axiom, on a 
proposition so inherently simple and nondeba- 
table that it was necessarily law. The Law 
Court, however, took the opposite view and said 
that the law was to the contrary, and as a result 
ordered a new trial. 

Now the question which the Law Court had 
thus passed upon was either obviously right as a 
matter of law, or obviously wrong. It was an 
elementary proposition, and I discovered, while 
it seemed to me that the law was necessarily 
wrong, elementarily wrong, — I discovered that 
there was no possible way by which I could ask 
the Law Court to reconsider its own decision 
and submit for their consideration that, in our 
judgment, there had been an inadvertent mis- 
take of law made. 

ii8 



And what was the result ? The result was that 
the only method found possible was to retry the 
whole case. In point of fact, we succeeded in 
making an arrangement by which the evidence, 
the printed record of the evidence, should be 
taken as having been put in over again, thus 
avoiding the expense of all the witnesses being 
summoned again, and I made the same point as 
I had before in regard to the law. Of course 
the presiding justice over-ruled the point under 
the decision of the full court, as he was bound to 
do, and I asked an exception again and carried 
the case to the Law Court again on the same 
identical point ; and after the fullest argument, 
and the fullest citation of authorities in that 
case, the Law Court of the State reversed its 
decision. And the late Chief Justice of the 
State, who had drawn the original opinion, 
which had been published in the books mean- 
while, himself, and voluntarily, as I was informed 
by some of my associates upon the Bench, took 
upon himself the onus of drawing the reversing 
opinion, stating with a magnanimity of mind 
that stamped his greatness not only as a lawyer 
but as a man, that he had been largely responsi- 
ble for the original inadvertence of the Court, 
for its original error, and he would draw the 
opinion frankly stating that fact, and the two 
opinions are now in the books. 

Now this same Law Court would have reached 
precisely the same result, without embarrass- 
ment to themselves, without annoyance to the 

119 



profession, without unnecessary expense to the 
parties, had there been power given under our 
statutes so that that decision after being made 
could have stood for, say, thirty days, and within 
that period either counsel might ask the Court 
to reconsider any obvious error of either law or 
fact, then the Court might modify or reverse 
their opinion as they desired and no new trial 
would then have been granted. In that case, 
to further illustrate the hardship of the principle, 
had we really been obliged to go through an 
actual new trial, which formerly had occupied at 
least ten days, and was one of the hardest 
fought cases I was ever engaged in, — the means 
of my client would have been absolutely inade- 
quate to have even thought of doing it, for it had 
more than strained his modest resources to 
provide the witnesses for the original trial and to 
maintain them at expense during the ten days of 
the trial. Now I earnestly suggest to the mem- 
bers of this Association the wisdom and the 
imperative need of a change of legislation which 
I think could be simply done and in the line with 
the precedents of other states and of the United 
States Courts in that particular. 

There is only one other thing to which I desire 
to call the attention of the members of this 
Association. 

I received a letter from a member of the 
Bench of this State the other day in connection 
with this meeting in which the learned judge 
stated that though he knew I was conservative 



in my own views as to legal reform, he thought 
I must admit there were certain things which 
caused delay and entailed unnecessary expense. 

One of those things, and the thing which to 
my mind would save the greatest expense in 
litigation, lies, it seems to me, in the absolute 
power of the Court itself, by rule which it 
should make, and which it seems to me ought to 
be made, — and that is the over-burdensome cost 
of printing a case, resulting from the manner in 
which it is done, from the looseness of the print, 
the small number of words upon a page, the 
spreading of those over a very large space, and 
the insertion verbatim of every question and 
answer, whether material or immaterial. A 
rule of Court that should require a given form, a 
given number of words upon a page, and should 
require, at least with proper reservations, all the 
ordinary testimony to be in narrative form, so 
that all the essential evidence could be served in 
compact form both to counsel and to the Court. 
Such a rule of Court, to my mind, would cut 
down by one-third to one-half the expense of 
printing; and, as is familiar to the members of 
the Bar, the cost of printing after an extended 
jury trial may often far exceed all the other 
expenses, including those of counsel, in the case. 
I respectfully suggest to the Association and to 
the Court the desirability of saving in that 
respect a wastefulness of expense. 

Now, gentlemen, I do not and cannot forget 
in closing that this is an Association of the 



members of the Bar. The distinguished judges 
of the Court are members of this Association 
ex vij-tute officii, and are always its most wel- 
come guests when we can obtain their presence ; 
but essentially this is an organization of the Bar; 
and does not the roster of their names alone, 
those who have graced this Bar, living and dead, 
bring its note of encouragement to us as plain 
members of the Bar of Maine ? 

I yield to no man in my estimate of the high 
duties and honors of the Bench, but I love to 
think them fully matched by the opportunity 
and career of a great lawyer at the Bar. 

The voices which echo down the dim corridors 
of history, the trumpet tones that have daunted 
oppression and stirred the nations to liberty 
have come in surprising numbers from the 
master minds of the Anglo-Saxon Bar. Erskine, 
Grattan, Fox, Emmett and Burke in England; 
Patrick Henry, the Adamses, Hamilton and 
Sumner in America, to speak not of more recent 
names, are the men whose great hammer strokes 
have slowly beat out for us the divine, imperish- 
able shape of human liberty. 

Over against the career of a judge upon the 
Bench, I would set for a moment the career 
within grasp of a great leader at the Bar — self- 
respecting and never servile, wise and conserva- 
tive in counsel yet courageous in his convictions 
both as to law and fact, proud of winning his 
case yet not dismayed by temporary defeat, 
setting store by the books yet setting greater 



store by the power of original thinking and the 
luminous unfolding of legal principles which 
alone give value to the books, sullied by no taint 
of dishonor yet daring all things else in discharg- 
ing his duty to his client, — all of us are justly 
proud to follow, etiam longo intervallo, such an 
exalted ideal. 

I love to feel that the ambitions aimed at by a 
great judge upon the Bench and a great leader 
at the Bar are different indeed, but not in lofti- 
ness ; that where they deviate, it is not like two 
ways of which one seeks the valley and one the 
height, but, rather, like ways which climb dis- 
tinct yet kindred peaks, both towering into a 
rarer air. And so along the way, when we again 
press upward, now perhaps in some darkness, 
now catching the gleam of stars, we are proud to 
feel that the word which passes through the night 
from Bench to Bar, from Bar to Bench, from 
mountain top to mountain top, is not a cry for 
help, but the friendly hail of equals, each seek- 
ing a higher plane. I thank you, gentlemen, 
again. (Applause.) 



123 



JOHN A. PETERS 
April 2, igo4 

One dead— a State in tears ! Yet all the earth 
Brest for a festival ! Could he come back, 
Think you he might not choose, himself, that June, 
The rose -appareled, deck his memory. 
Whose days, like June's, were dipped in splendid dyes? 

Richly he lived. The streaming years that went, 
Were each a very Pactolus to him, 
And grains of gold ran, glittering, through his talk. 

Joyously, too, he lived. No bitterness — 
But, as the robin doth with song the day 
Outwear, so with him, whatsoe'er he did, 
His spirit always sang. 

Justly he lived. Facing, indeed, his truth. 
The lie, unspoken, died upon the lip. 
On his clear vision no one might impose, 
Who sought the law for malice or offence. 
Friendships he had, and strong, but yet no man 
Who lived, upon that friendship dared presume 
For favor, or to gain a wrongful cause. 
His gentleness did not o'er shallows run ; 
Let but injustice raise her front, and then 
The sunny depths of his great nature stirred 
To awful indignation. All men knew. 
Instinctively, who in his presence were, 
Justice, with her white robe, did wrap him round. 

Greatly he lived. Not sky, nor solemn stars. 
Deep woods vexed by no wind, nor aught beside 
Of high, appeasing beauty God doth show, 
Move more serenely in their ministries. 
Than this great Judge among his fellow men. 

125 



Calm in his own, respecting others' strength, 
Envy he knew not, malice could not know, 
Whose nature was all magnanimity. 
His rectitude bred no uncharity, 
Justice with mercy tempered was his creed, 
Human himself, he loved humanity. 

Richly if he received, he richly gave ; 
Miser of words, but prodigal of thought — 
Which words must stand for, else remain but words — 
His phrase was terse and tense. His sentences 
Did not in open order march, but stood 
Serried and close, ranks full, for battle drawn. 

Despite past triumphs of the common law, 
Full many a problem still were unresolved. 
But for some great deliverance, or some 
Illuminating phrase, which he has left. 
Men gladly glean where he did richly reap. 
And we, who follow after, are made proud 
By even one wisp of gold, if from his sheaves. 

Yet even for him the end, as comes to all. 
His high and ministering office, where 
He bore himself so long and worthily. 
Freely he put away, and was content 
To rest awhile before the stream was crossed. 
Hail and be hailed of friends, and take his leave. 

From dust — through glorj^ — back again to dust! 
Wanting but this, the cycle to complete, 
A little room to lie, a little sleep, 
Then — swift surprise of immortality ! 

Even to the end, walking the sunset-path. 
Life but a mellow light from out the past, 
His glistening honors by himself put off. 
Naught to bestow, or crave — even thus, by some 
Blithe necromancy of his spirit, he 
Held all men to him as with hooks of steel. 



126 



The grace that was not grace alone, but strength, 
Unwounding wit, sun-lit philosophy. 
Deep knowledge of mankind — these all were thine. 
Departed Friend ! Never again shall we 
Behold thy like ! And yet, because we know 
The soul that was within thee hath but struck 
Its earthly tent, to pitch it once anew 
Upon those plains where camp the glorious Dead, 
We, who yet stay, and came today to mourn, 
Sprinkle, instead, June roses on thy grave. 



127 



MEMORIALS 



ORVILLE D. BAKER 

Ke7tnebec Journal, August l8, igo8 

The news of the sudden death of Hon. Orville 
D. Baker came as a great shock to the com- 
munity. A man in the prime and vigor of life, 
the future certainly seemed to promise him 
fullness of years. His death removes from our 
midst one of our ablest and most prominent 
citizens. He was recognized as one of the great 
lawyers of New England, a man of integrity, 
loyal to his clients, strong in his friendships, and 
tolerant in all things. He knew how to give and 
take hard blows in any cause in which he was 
enlisted; but he never cherished unworthy re- 
sentments or carried away the scars of battle. 
Born and reared in Augusta, Mr. Baker was 
always intensely interested in all that pertained 
to the growth and welfare of our city. He was 
ready at all times and in all places, to champion 
her cause. 

The removal of such a man from our midst in 
the very zenith of his strength and activity, is 
indeed a great loss to the community and one 
which is deeply felt by all our citizens. 

General Baker was more than a great lawyer. 
He was a great scholar, a man of the broadest 
culture, and a conversationalist of rare brilliancy. 

131 



It was in the quiet of his own home, which after 
the death of his father he always maintained in 
this city, that he was seen at his best. There, 
throwing off the cares and worries of his busy 
professional life, he took a keen delight in the 
society of his friends, finding a peculiar pleasure 
in those whose tastes, like his own, ran in 
literary channels. With his rare grace of dic- 
tion, and his keen analytical mind General Baker, 
had he devoted his life to letters, as he did to 
law, might have won even greater laurels in the 
field of authorship. 

He had in a marvelous degree, the power of 
mental concentration, which enabled him to 
assimilate rapidly and clearly the details of any 
subject which engrossed his attention. He had 
a wonderful capacity for hard work, and was 
equal to long sustained effort, that would have 
been impossible to a man of less physical and 
mental vigor. 

But after all, perhaps, the most striking thing 
about him was the lightness with which he 
apparently bore the many and exacting cares of 
his busy professional life. The face he turned 
to the world was always a genial and smiling 
one. If he had worries, he certainly was master 
of the art of concealing them from his associates. 
He rarely talked shop with his friends, appar- 
ently finding a keen zest in the discussion of 
topics outside of his legal activities. He was an 
orator of rare gifts, with a strong personality, a 
wonderful command of pure English, a pleasing 

132 



voice, and rare power in marshaling and present- 
ing facts. He was also an after-dinner speaker 
of exceptional brilliancy, and one who took an 
unfeigned delight in the bonhomie of such 
occasions. The people of Augusta will unite in 
mourning his loss. 



133 



ORVILLE DEWEY BAKER 

Maine Farmer, August ig, igo8 

Orville Dewey Baker of Augusta died in- 
stantly last Sunday evening of heart disease, 
from which he had been suffering for some time. 

Mr. Baker was born in Augusta and would 
have been sixty-one years old next December. 
He was an only child and was never married. 

His father, Joseph Baker, himself a lawyer of 
exceptional ability, early designed for his son 
that profession. Orville Baker graduated from 
Bowdoin College and the Harvard Law School 
and then began the practice of law with his 
father. His success was immediate and con- 
tinued in ever increasing measure to the time of 
his death. He had a wonderful mind in a 
magnificent body, and early made his chosen 
profession his chief object in life. For him, but 
two things were really of importance : His 
work which he loved, and the recreations he felt 
necessary to maintain his health. He had no 
diversity of occupations whatever. As he had 
chosen the law for his life work, so he made it 
such. His life work, the law, was always first, 
everything else came afterward. He might 
have made a great success in political life, for he 
would have adorned any position ; but the only 

135 



public position he ever held, that of Attorney 
General, was distinctly in the line of his profes- 
sion. He might have made a great success in 
business, but as he had chosen the law, so he 
made it the end and aim of his working life. To 
this singleness of purpose, may be attributed his 
pre-eminent successes. 

As Attorney General, while still a young man, 
he made a State reputation for himself by win- 
ning, for the State, the conviction of Stain and 
Cromwell in the celebrated Barron murder case. 
His victories as counsel for the leading indi- 
viduals and corporations of the State have been 
so many and so signal that he easily ranked as 
Maine's ablest lawyer, and as second to none in 
New England. In fact, competent judges have 
assigned him rank with the leading half dozen 
lawyers of this country. 

As an advocate he was eloquent and convinc- 
ing, but his great power was in his ability to 
concentrate all his powers on the case in hand. 
When he took up a case, there was for him, for 
the time being, nothing else whatever. He first 
learned his case thoroughly, both the ins and 
outs, then he learned his opponent's case. No 
detail was too small or too unimportant for his 
attention. His examination and cross-examina- 
tion of witnesses was masterly. His knowledge 
of the law was profound, and his briefs were 
models of legal logic. 

During the past six years, Mr. Baker won 
added honors by his services for the various 

'36 



water companies whose properties have been 
taken by certain municipalities under the name 
of water districts. These were certainly the 
largest and most important cases ever at bar in 
this State, the six in which Mr. Baker was chief 
counsel aggregating nearlj^ five and a half 
millions of dollars. These cases involved new 
legal practice for this State, and, in the course 
of these trials, chiefly through Mr. Baker's 
abilities, precedents and rules have been made 
which the courts, and the people, through their 
Legislatures, have established as marking the 
way by which equal justice may be done the 
people and such corporations. 

Twenty-one months ago, Mr. Baker became 
suddenly aware that he was suffering from the 
fatal disease which caused his death, and that he 
could not hope for long life. With a courage 
that was sublime, after fifty-nine years of superb 
physical health, he faced the inevitable, and went 
steadfastly on with his work. He was in full 
possession of his marvelous mental powers to the 
instant of his death. In fact, he recently con- 
ducted the longest and most important suit ever 
tried in this State, that of the appraisal of the 
Portland water companies, at which, in his con- 
cluding argument, he spoke for four days with 
only the briefest notes. At the Bowdoin Col- 
lege Commencement in June, he spoke for the 
class of 1868, in reference to the present elective 
system, and his speech was the gem of the 
occasion. 

137 



There are many lessons to be learned from 
Mr. Baker's life, and the chiefest of these are 
the necessity, the value and the dignity of work. 
Blessed as he was with superb health, gifted 
mentally as he so wonderfully was, he relied 
only upon his personal attributes as tools with 
which to carve out success. He chose his life 
work and then with an eye single for that and 
that alone aimed for the topmost point of his 
profession. This he reached, and his untimely 
death loses to the State of Maine one of its truly 
great men. 

He bore his honors modestly, his burdens 
bravely, and to us who were privileged to know 
him intimately, and so to love him, his early 
going to a better world brings the deepest sense 
of personal loss. 



138 



AS A MAN AND LAWYER 
Portland Daily Press, August //, igo8 

Well might the people of Maine say with one 
of old that a prince and a great man has fallen. 
Mr. Baker filled a great place at the bar, in 
politics and in a higher sense in the social life of 
the State. He was a strong man and person- 
ality, and his reputation made at a comparatively 
early age increased with every year of his pro- 
fessional life. 

Those who knew him during the closing years 
of his career will remember the erect figure, the 
noble head crowned with gray hair, the musical 
voice, and the almost marvelous command of 
choice and vigorous English. 

He delighted in a great legal battle. His 
mind was eminently judicial. He could see the 
strong as well as the weak points in the case his 
opponent would present, and he never made the 
mistake of undervaluing the opposing attorney. 
There were times when his presentation of a 
case became almost that of the court, but he 
never failed at the end to show the strong and 
as he felt dominating force of his own conten- 
tion. He sometimes made his case turn on a 
single point, conceding all the rest to his oppo- 
nent and then he became almost irresistible 
because he brought to the consideration of the 

^39 



central point all his great powers and all his 
logic and eloquence. 

He had a touch of the grand manner we 
associate now with the old school of lawyers and 
of gentlemen. He never abused an opponent, 
never for a moment failed in courtesy, and his 
cross examination of witnesses while searching 
and sharp never went beyond that point. His 
great desire was to establish his case by evidence 
and logic not to be shaken. 

There were times when Mr. Baker became 
very eloquent. His sense of fair play and all 
that it should mean to all men was very high, 
and any attempt on the part of an attorney to 
take undue and as he felt uncalled for advantage, 
or to put a strained and needless interpretation 
on any portion of the evidence called from him 
hot words of strong and earnest condemnation 
made all the more stinging because he rested his 
case on the law and the evidence as a whole, and 
scorned to make a personal application. 

His knowledge of the law was great, and he 
seemed to those who followed him through a 
case to have the authorities always at his com- 
mand. He did not pile case on case or use 
words needlessly but his briefs deserved the 
name, and he was content when he had mar- 
shalled his citations and showed their direct 
bearing on the case before the court. 

He was a great jury lawyer. He carried a 
jury wdth him to the conclusion he sought to 
reach largely because he was thoroughly con- 

140 



vinced himself that no other conclusion could 
possibly be attained, and that no other theory 
could be reasonably entertained. He presented 
a criminal case in an almost irresistible way. 
Circumstantial evidence others, lawyers as well 
as laymen, thought could be explained away he 
made a great chain, link fitting to link until he 
left the jury no other course than to find the 
respondent guilty. 

His political addresses were of the same order. 
He was a man of strong convictions, but he 
never knowingly or willingly placed party before 
country. He was ambitious to win the highest 
success in his profession, but he did not show 
any desire to receive high political honors. He 
would have rendered splendid service to the 
State in any position, but he felt the high impor- 
tance of his profession, and he was at once a 
safe attorney and a wise counsellor. 

He was a great worker. He was not content 
to know much about a case in which he was 
interested, but felt that he must know all that 
any man could hope to know of it. He mastered 
a case in all its details, and when he stood before 
a court and jury he was ready to proceed. 

His eloquence, and as has been said, there 
were times when he became very eloquent, was 
natural to the man. He had great command of 
the most vigorous English. He read deeply, 
drew from the great masters of the English 
language the best they had to give him, and 
then he charmed and convinced. He could be 

141 



sarcastic, he was witty, and his wit was like that 
of Thomas B. Reed, at times, but he never tried 
to show his learning, or to be eloquent for the 
sake of making a personal reputation. 

He was honest. He did not deceive a client, 
but rather made the points of law and the 
matters of fact against a client more prominent 
at the counsel table than those in his favor. He 
discouraged litigation and felt the supreme im- 
portance of going into court, if at all, as a last 
resort. 

A long succession of learned and distinguished 
justices of the Supreme court listened to his 
presentation of points of law with unflagging 
interest. A long succession of juries heard his 
marshalling of his evidence and his logical argu- 
ments and were convinced. 

His nature was kindly. He did not court the 
favorable notice of the press or seek for formal 
and perhaps unmeaning congratulation, but he 
was grateful for appreciative words, and was 
great enough to say so. He was a manly man 
in all respects, a well-rounded man, a well- 
balanced nature, a brilliant intellect, finely 
equipped for the doing of his best every time. 

He rose to every occasion. He was a large 
man, a man capable of taking a broad view of 
things. He was at once a student and a man 
of affairs. His was a very high ideal of the law; 
his a high ideal of life. 

He was a brave man. He knew, it is said, 
that he could not hope to see length of years, 

142 



but he faced the white light of eternity and 
went straight forward to do his appointed work 
in this world. Higher courage no man has, 
higher courage no man ever had, or ever can 
have than this. He was his bright, true and 
manly self to the last. 

And now this great lawyer, brilliant and 
eloquent advocate and leader of the people has 
fallen. He seemed to those who only saw him 
in court or on the street to be in the best of 
health and the news of his sudden death will be 
a great shock to his friends, to the bar, and to 
his fellow citizens. 

He will be long remembered. He was of the 
goodly company of great lawyers and safe coun- 
sellors of the land, and he was in the line of 
succession to the great lawyers of the past. He 
loved the basic principles of the law, and felt 
that the end to be sought was fair play and 
justice. It is not too much to say that in all his 
professional life and in his life outside of his 
profession he believed in the square deal. 

He was a great citizen of a great State. He 
loved Maine and had for his State ideals no less 
lofty than he applied to his daily life. Those 
who knew him the best will mourn for him the 
most and no higher tribute than that can be 
paid to any man. 

No longer young, and yet with the snow-line 
still in the distance, he went out of life at a time 
when he had the most ample control of his great 
powers and when he might have taken for his 

143 



motto the words applied to one of the most 
knightly of men, "Always ready." 

Sad indeed would it be if we were forced to 
believe that he has passed from life unto death; 
right joyous is the thought, the hope, and even 
the abiding conviction that he has but exchanged 
a lower form of life for a greater, and that to 
him came not the message of death, but the call 
of the Master of Life, " Come up higher." 



144 



MEMORIAL SERVICES 



MEMORIAL SERVICES 

Memorial services were held by the Kennebec 
Bar at the Court House at Augusta, Tuesday, 
December i, 1908, before Associate Justice 
Whitehouse (presiding), Associate Justice Spear 
and Associate Justice Cornish, in honor of Hon. 
Albert G. Andrews, Hon. Lendall Titcomb, 
Hon. Orville D. Baker and Hon. Simon S. 
Brown, deceased during the year. 



A committee consisting of Hon. Charles F. 
Johnson, Hon. Herbert M. Heath, M. S. 
Holway, Esq., Hon. George W. Heselton and 
Harvey D. Eaton, Esq., presented resolutions 
upon the death of Hon. Orville Dewey Baker, 
by its chairman, Hon. Charles F. Johnson. 
Eulogies were pronounced by several members 
of the Bar, that by Hon. Herbert M. Heath 
being nearly identical with his study of Orville 
Baker as a lawyer ; page 1 1 of this volume. 



147 



Hon. C. F. Johnson 

May it please the Court : 

On the morning of August 17th, 1908, the 
newspapers contained the startling announce- 
ment that Hon. Orville Dewey Baker, a member 
of this Bar, had passed quickly, without pain or 
lingering sickness, from life to death, not without 
some warning to him and to some of his intimate 
friends, but to most of us with no knowledge of 
his lessened hold on life. 

Bench, Bar, and all classes of citizens realized 
that a great lawyer had laid down his work. 
Jurists and lawyers who could estimate the 
depth and extent of his legal knowledge, friends 
who appreciated his dignified, courtly manners 
and his engaging social qualities, clients with 
large business interests which depended upon 
his great legal ability for their protection all felt 
that they had sustained a great loss. 

While stunned by the suddenness of the 
shock, all were grateful that if the end must 
come, that it was not approached slowly with 
gradually diminishing health and loss of physical 
strength and that his sun set amid the full glow 
of the gorgeous colors which his great intel- 
lectuality and his splendid physical strength had 
created about it. It was well that it was so, for 
who that knew him but would have shrunk from 

149 



contemplating that splendid form, erect in all its 
manly vigor, bowed and wasted by disease, that 
strong, clear, active intellect weakened and 
clouded by physical pain! As we knew him, so 
he was to the last, a meteor in the legal heavens, 
flashing its rays of brilliant light to the very end 
of its course. 

In none was the sense of propriety more fully 
developed than in our friend, and none yielded 
more readily to that sense, so that much of the 
charm of his life and its success was due to it. 
I feel compelled by my appreciation of this, to 
attempt that which I know he would have me 
attempt, and, to avoid unstinted eulogy, but at 
the same time to pay that just tribute to his 
memory which truth and justice demand. 

That he was a great lawyer all will admit, but 
his greatness as a lawyer was not confined to 
any special field, and in this he was particularly 
distinguished. Of a strong poetic nature, so 
that in conversation about common things, the 
mere small talk of the ofifice or the social hour, 
he spoke the language of imagery and delighted 
in word painting; he was also gifted with 
stronger reasoning powers ; but whether he 
addressed the jury or the Court, friends gathered 
at the banquet table, or large gatherings of 
citizens, his imagination never led him from the 
firm base on which his reason bade him stand. 
He was, therefore, always clear, and however 
much his ideas were adorned by figures of 
speech or beautiful words, they were not thereby 

150 



obscured, but rendered more impressive by the 
dress in which they were attired. The dry facts 
of a long hearing deahng with expert knowledge, 
long tabulations and wearisome details were 
made attractive and interesting by the dress in 
which he clothed them. Subtle reasoning upon 
great questions of law fixed attention because of 
the apt words with which it proceeded, but 
neither his facts nor his law were buried beneath 
his word painting, for he was not a dauber, but 
an artist who knew how to bring out the natural 
qualities of the objects upon which he exercised 
his art. He did not veneer, but brought out 
and developed the grains of the natural wood by 
his polish of words. 

Fortunate in his natural abilities and in his 
early training under the special care of a fond 
and proud father, himself a great lawyer, he was 
also no less fortunate in the control of his great 
powers, so that all in him worked harmoniously 
and preserved their perfect relation. He, there- 
fore, spoke easily, gracefully and eloquently, but 
always with good sense, and full comprehension 
of the fitness of things. He was an orator of a 
high order, but he never allowed this easy path 
to popularity to lead him from considering the 
sound reason of things. He preferred to exer- 
cise his great talents in the line of his profession 
rather than upon the platform or on the hustings. 

How the dull air of many a court room has 
been enlivened and lightened by the brilliant 
words shot across it by him, true to the mark! 

151 



Our friend was more than a great lawyer, he 
was a great man, he loved good books, he loved 
the beautiful in art and in nature. He would 
have been eminently successful if he had chosen 
a literary career. Many of his speeches were 
gems of art, and his poem on Chief Justice 
Peters shows how strong the poetic nature was 
within him. Nature appealed to him as it does 
to all strong minds; he knew the songs of the 
birds, their habits, their seasons of flight and 
return, and he loved the ocean and his vacations 
by its shore. A walk with him would disclose 
how strong a tie there was between his great 
mind and the common things of life. He knew 
men, too, and none could weigh them more 
accurately than he. How his searching cross- 
examinations bore down the barriers behind 
which witnesses sought to conceal the truth, and 
how accurately he guessed at their motives and 
drew them out to view by his unerring knowl- 
edge of human nature ! 

Our friend also knew and practiced the courte- 
sies of our profession, for he was by nature and 
training a gentleman. It is pleasant to recall 
his cheery greeting, his courteous manners. 
While in the heat of a trial he often spoke 
warmly and with strong convictions in defense 
of his client's rights, and was able to hold his 
own in the give and take of repartee, he always 
had himself under control and his language was 
uniformly courteous to opposing counsel and to 
the Court, without the display of any irritability. 

152 



Kennebec Bar and the State have lost a great 
lawyer, a dignified, courteous gentleman, many 
of us a kind friend whose genial manner we 
recall with pleasure, and in performance of the 
duty delegated to me by the Kennebec Bar 
Association, I offer the following resolutions: 



153 



RESOLUTIONS 

Resolved, That in the death of Hon. Orville 
Dewey Baker the Kennebec Bar Association 
has lost a most distinguished member, whose 
great learning and ability displayed in the whole 
field of practice of the law gave him high rank 
among the great lawyers of our State, whose 
natural eloquence embellished by learning and 
the grace of a charming literary style and 
strengthened by sound common sense and deep 
convictions always delighted and seldom failed 
to convince ; whose dignity, courtesy and gentle- 
manly bearing made his presence everywhere 
pleasing and agreeable, whose extensive knowl- 
edge of the law and his love for and devotion to 
its practice with his high ideals of a lawyer's 
duty have added greater dignity and importance 
to our profession. 

Resolved, That the Kennebec Bar Association 
is proud of his honors and his achievements and 
feeling itself fortunate that he was one of its 
members during the whole of his illustrious 
professional life, will long cherish the memory 
of the great legal mind, eloquent tongue and dis- 
tinguished presence which so highly honored it. 



154 



Melvin S. Holway 

May it please the Coiiri : 

Highly do I esteem the privilege of taking- 
part in these solemn exercises devoted to the 
commemoration of the four departed members 
of our Bar but recently taken from us. Great 
and unprecedented in our history is this suc- 
cession of bereavements and tragic in their 
suddenness were the deaths of three, one being 
that of Orville Dewey Baker, our distinguished 
leader. I knew him from my youth. I enjoyed 
his friendship for many years — our acquaintance 
grew closer as time went by. I found him 
always a delightful companion, a loyal and 
helpful friend, and his unexpected and prema- 
ture death leaves me with the consciousness of 
great, irreparable loss. 

The impression Orville Baker made upon me 
was that of a man whose rare natural powers 
were fully developed for the purposes to which 
he devoted his life. He made himself a great 
lawyer. In public life he might have been 
great ; in literature, and possibly in other forms 
of art, he might have excelled. Like other great 
men his life showed constant growth until he 
attained the absolute mastery of his profession, 
and in full control of his matured powers with 
no decline towards old age and its waning 

155 



faculties, he passed away leaving as an enduring 
monument his record of splendid achievements. 
An only son of a distinguished lawyer, his 
training from youth was intended to fit him for 
distinction as a scholar, an orator and for 
success in the law. He has told me in recent 
months of the great debt he owed to his training 
in the Augusta High School under that dis- 
tinguished teacher, Mr. Frank Waterhouse. 
Mr. Waterhouse made friends of his students, 
encouraged them in athletic sports for their 
suitable physical development. He made them 
feel ashamed of ignorance and inferiority. He 
was able to excite in them a keen interest in 
their studies and the desire to excel in whatever 
they undertook. From success in school, the 
position of a leader in his ever-loved Bowdoin 
College and in the Harvard Law School, and 
after a well-spent year in Europe, Mr. Baker 
entered upon the duties of his profession. Of 
his life-long devotion to his work, of his con- 
stantly increasing success we all know. He v/as 
a good son. The affectionate relations between 
himself and his father were peculiarly close. 
He always showed to his mother the greatest 
deference and highest regard; they lived until 
Mr. Baker reached the age of thirty-five years, 
and then in the same year both were taken from 
him. Mr. Baker always sought and was wel- 
come in the best society, and doubtless owed 
much to the brilliant and able men and to the 
refined and cultivated women whose acquain- 

156 



tance he enjoyed. Although the citizen of a 
small town, he saw men like Blaine and Morrill 
rise to distinction in the nation, and other of our 
citizens achieve triumphs in law, in public life, 
in great business enterprises, which could not 
fail to stir the ambition of a man of his unusual 
powers. 

He achieved mastery of the arts of advocacy 
and a profound knowledge of the law. He was 
powerful in attack, stubborn in defense, tireless 
in his efforts and most thorough in his prepara- 
tion of cases. His powers were such that he 
seemed to do with ease what others could only 
do with difficulty. With a great capacity for 
work and devotion to his chosen profession, with 
a love for the battles of the law, he went on 
from success to greater success and was long an 
acknowledged leader. He was happy, too, in his 
profession, believed it worthy of his best efforts 
and loved to labor for the interests of his clients. 

He was a most companionable man. He loved 
his home, his native town, and had the genius 
which appreciates simple, everyday things, life in 
the open air, walks along the country roads and 
through woodland paths and viewing from some 
commanding height the varied beauties of the 
landscape. He loved to look often upon familiar 
scenes and find ever-new beauty therein. To 
him every sunset was a revelation of the beauty 
of the universe. He loved to dwell with the 
sound of the sea in his ears and pass his hours 
in watching its mighty and mysterious move- 

157 



ments. He loved the birds and to spend silent, 
patient hours in studying their beauties of shape, 
plumage and movement, in listening" to their 
songs and calls and learning the natures of these 
aerial visitors. He loved his pets and other 
four-footed friends, and little children, and all 
these were attracted to him. 

And above all he loved his friends ; he liked 
to have them about him ; he gave freely of his 
intelligence, his wit, the resources of his richly- 
stored mind, to the companions of his leisure 
hours. He delighted to fill his home with 
choice, rare and beautiful objects of art and to 
dispense refined and bountiful hospitality to his 
friends and associates. 

While he had passed beyond the stage of 
loving knowledge for its own sake and did not 
occupy himself over-much with books, his inter- 
est in life in the great, varied, wonderful world 
was never more fresh and keen than when, at 
the climax of success, with the shout of victory 
ringing in his ears, the summons came for him 
to go. In the midst of the glories of mid- 
summer, at the close of a perfect Sabbath day 
at his beautiful home by the resounding sea, 
surrounded by loving friends and familiar faces, 
mercifully spared all suffering, he sank to rest. 

He leaves to us who mourn the feeling that 
the memory of our acquaintance and companion- 
ship with him will ever be one of the choice 
treasures of our life. 



158 



Harvey D. Eaton 

Orville Dewey Baker was a great man. His 
tireless industry, his legal acumen, his command- 
ing intellectual power were known and recog- 
nized of all. His genial and kindly qualities 
were equally strong. It was my privilege to 
know him as my personal friend and counsellor 
as well as colleague and opponent, and in all 
those relations I enjoyed from Mr. Baker such 
kindness and consideration as is only seldom 
shown, and made his sudden loss a personal 
grief to me. 



159 



Hon. W. p. Whitehouse 

On the fourth day of December 1883, almost 
precisely a quarter of a century ago, in this hall 
of justice which for more than forty years had 
been the principal scene of his forensic labors 
and triumphs, memorial exercises were held in 
the superior court upon- the death of Joseph 
Baker, a distinguished member of this Bar, who 
had for many years been acknowledged as one of 
the most learned and accomplished lawyers and 
powerful advocates in our State. It became 
my sad privilege to respond to the resolutions 
then presented as an expression of deep sorrow 
for his loss and sincere respect for his memory. 
In his earlier life he had been a successful jour- 
nalist, and had repeatedly been the recipient of 
political honors from his fellow citizens, but with 
these temporary diversions he remained constant 
in his desire and purpose to bend his mind to the 
philosophy of the law and make the practice of 
the legal profession the work of his life ; and 
though it was then said of him that he "touched 
nothing which he did not adorn," yet like the 
fabled Ant?eus he seemed to draw invincible 
strength only when his feet touched the solid 
earth of his chosen profession. 

Orville Dewey Baker was the son of Joseph 
and Frances Rogers Baker. His mother was a 

160 



sister of the famous Jonathan P. Rogers, a 
lawyer distinguished alike for his mastery of 
legal principles and his skill and power as 
advocate, who practiced for some years in 
Bangor as the partner of Edward Kent and 
afterward removed to Boston at the personal 
request of Daniel Webster, where he " died in 
comparative youth in the midst of a growing 
fame." The traditions of both the Penobscot 
and Suffolk bars have united in presenting 
Jonathan Rogers to the succeeding generations 
as a legal giant. 

Orville Baker was endowed with intellectual 
gifts and powers of a very high order, and from 
his early childhood to the time of his entering 
upon the practice of the law, his academic and 
legal education, as well as his entire'^ mental 
development, progressed under the constant 
supervision and vigilant care of his devoted 
father. The ripe scholarship which was the 
fruition of his course at Bowdoin College was 
succeeded by appreciative travel and study in 
foreign countries. With such broad and liberal 
culture as a foundation, he prosecuted his legal 
studies at Harvard Law School and graduated 
with a comprehensive grasp of the science of the 
law unsurpassed by that of any other graduate 
in that decade. He entered upon the practice 
of the law injpartnership with his father, with a 
splendid equipment for the pursuit of the most 
imperial and exacting of all the learned profes- 
sions, and he came per saltinn into the front 

i6i 



rank of the best legal scholars and ablest trial 
lawyers of the State. I well remember the first 
important jury trial in which during the second 
year of his practice, he was put forward by 
the senior member of the firm to make the 
closing argument to the jury. With an orderly 
grouping of the relevant facts about each of the 
propositions, with much rhetorical adornment 
and elaboration, with caustic satire and glowing 
eloquence, the argument was pressed forward to 
its logical conclusion. Although in this first 
case the evidence was not accepted by the jury 
as sufficient to support the premises of the 
argument, the effort was recognized by all as 
one of distinguished ability and splendid promise. 

" Then felt we like some watcher of the skies 
When a new planet swims into his ken." 

That a new and brilliant luminary had flashed 
into Maine's constellation of the law was 
promptly recognized throughout the State. If 
any had lingering doubts at that time whether 
he possessed the practical wisdom, the correct 
mental poise and the intuitive sense of common 
right which are indispensible to the highest 
success in the profession, their doubts were 
promptly removed by rapidly succeeding efforts of 
his subsequent career, which abundantly fulfilled 
the brilliancy of early promise. Under the 
chastening influences of superior culture and the 
study of the masterpieces of P^nglish oratory, he 
avoided the excessive use of words of Latin 



162 



origin and "escaped the common perils of mag- 
niloquence." With a rich vocabulary of both 
Latin and Saxon words, his addresses disclosed 
no fixed preference for either, but he aptly chose 
the term which most exactly and forcibly ex- 
pressed the pressing thought or dominant mood 
of the moment. He was also endowed in an 
eminent degree with the faculty of imagination 
which enabled him by striking illustrations to 
give vividness to every scene and increased 
power to the expression of every thought. The 
opening paragraph of his address at a recent 
memorial service may be quoted as at once an 
illustration of the elegance of his diction and the 
beauty of his imagery, and an expression of the 
infinite pathos of this occasion, as well as of that, 
when one in the full possession of all his facul- 
ties and in full tide and stress of his useful work, 
has passed away in the midst of his earthly 
years. 

"At times we are strikingly reminded that, 
close beside the borders of life, set with all its 
blooms, flows the river of death, into whose 
forbidding waters no man may step and then 
return, and no man who has once entered may 
send answer back from the farther shore. When 
it comes to one who is frail with sickness, or 
weary with the hardships of life, the fingers of 
death are soft and even welcome, and draw one 
gently to repose. But when it overtakes, as it 
did here, the strong man in harness, it must give 
us pause, in order that we may cast a glance at 

163 



the life, the character and the career of him who 
has left us." 

Another illustration of his figurative style 
may be found at the close of his argument in the 
proceedings by address before the Maine Legis- 
lature in 1 891. "Now that the clamor of this 
great debate and cause will soon be still — as of 
old after the wind, the earthquake and the storm, 
there is to come that still, small voice in the 
conscience of every one of you which is to pass 
upon and decide this question. The State, no 
individual, is on trial here. Individuals may 
come or go, but justice and the State endure. 
Even fame is a candle almost as brief as life 
itself, and honor and disgrace alike will soon be 
put to sleep by the sprinkled poppy of oblivion. 
But there remains with us the majesty of the 
eternal justice." 

" You are here in the broad and noble spirit of 
the old Roman Senate, to see that the Republic 
takes no harm. If you should omit this duty, if 
you should betray this trust, 

' Not poppy or mandragora, 
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, 
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep, 
Which thou owedst yesterday.' 

You are the watchers on the coast. Beneath 
you are the rocks. One fair ship, with its freight 
of talent and of promise, has just sunk before 
your eyes. In front, and far out at sea, stretch- 
ing beyond the horizon's edge, through the 
stress of the dark and the night, down drives the 

164 



fleet of the future, straight toward the rocks 
which split and sink. Your vote must light the 
signal, for rescue or for ruin. The good ships 
wait for you. What shall the signal be, — false 
lights to beckon, or a beacon to warn and save?" 

As a trial lawyer Mr. Baker did not rely solely 
upon the breadth and accuracy of his general 
knowledge of the law, or upon the fertility of his 
resources ; but he subjected the details of each 
case to a thorough analysis and his preparation 
for trial was painstaking and complete. In pre- 
senting the evidence to the jury his method of 
conducting the direct examination of his wit- 
nesses was so gently persuasive and subtly 
argumentative as to avoid objection on the part 
of opposing counsel and when his testimony was 
closed, the probative force of every fact was 
understood by the jury, and often no closing 
argument was required. As a cross-examiner, 
probably no lawyer in the State was so greatly 
feared and dreaded by all witnesses who were 
tempted to prevarication and falsehood. Such 
was the merciless power of his sarcasm and 
ridicule, and his relentless pursuit of the witness 
from point to point, that the mental torture of 
his victim was often painfully manifest. 

But however strong his personal conviction 
might be that no argument was necessary, he 
never faltered in his summing up to the jury in 
important cases, but with an accurate and 
almost intuitive perception of the legal principles 
involved, with a splendid analysis and marvelous 

165 



grasp of all the evidence, with superb expression 
and confident assertion, with splendid rhetoric 
and faultless logic, and with eloquence attuned 
to the general harmony of effect, he strove to 
carry conviction to the minds of the jury. In 
complicated cases, he stalked with aggressive 
courage across the devious ways of conflicting 
details of testimony and safely took the main 
avenue to the conclusion for which he contended. 
Several of his arguments before the law court 
were striking illustrations of the creative power 
and expansive force of the principles of the 
common law and their adaptability, in the hands 
of a master, to new conditions in industrial and 
social life. By thus aiding to establish what are 
termed new rules of law, he has made valuable 
contributions to the jurisprudence of Maine. 

In 1885 he was elected attorney general of the 
State, and no lawyer in Maine ever came to that 
office with more admirable qualifications for the 
proper and successful discharge of its duties. In 
the prosecution of Stain and Cromwell upon the 
charge of murder, his closing argument was a 
masterpiece of analytical power and forensic 
oratory, rarely if ever surpassed in New England 
since the days of Webster and Choate. It is 
scarcely an exaggeration to apply to him the 
language recently employed by Mr. Dawson in 
describing Edmund Burke. "He lifted the most 
formidable burdens of thought with easy mas- 
tery, probing their profoundest depths with 
almost superhuman power and insight. "VVher\ 

166 



once his imagination caught the flame, his whole 
mind seemed to flow, hke molten ore. He 
touched the supreme heights of thought, of 
passion, of feeling, without an effort." 

"Across his sea of mind 

The thought came streaming like a blazing ship 

Upon a mighty wind." 

He possessed exceptional powers of mental 
concentration and long sustained effort, and 
with his great talents, keen discrimination, ripe 
scholarship and extensive knowledge, with his 
highly cultivated literary tastes and rare artistic 
sense, he could not have failed to achieve dis- 
tinction in any department of intellectual effort 
to which the study of his life might have been 
devoted. But he wisely chose for his life work 
the study and practice of the great science of 
human rights and social tranquility. With an 
unsurpassed alertness of mind and imperturbable 
self command, he was admirably equipped for 
the contest of the forum and easily "beat a 
pathway out to wealth and fame." He cherished 
exalted conceptions of the honor of the legal 
profession, the dignity of the law and the 
sanctity of justice, and never failed to maintain 
a respectful and courtly demeanor towards all 
incumbents of the judicial office. Throughout 
his professional career I think he never con- 
sciously rendered any service or pursued any 
course which was not in harmony with the 
ethical canons of the profession and character- 



167 



ized by good faith towards his opponents and 
associates at the bar. 

In apparent contrast to the aggressive and 
controversial spirit of the court room, in all of 
his personal and social relations Mr. Baker was 
gentle and affable, kindly and unassuming. He 
was apparently undismayed by unexpected ob- 
stacles in the trial of a cause and when he left 
the court house, he seemed to leave behind him 
all the cares and anxieties of the day, and with a 
buoyant spirit and a cheerful manner welcomed 
the social converse of the evening. In the quiet 
of his own home, surrounded by choice literature 
and numerous works of art of which he was an 
excellent judge, the most lovable qualities of his 
mind and engaging attributes of his character 
were illustrated. Among congenial friends, his 
conversation was always enlivened with his own 
genial wit and humor and embellished by literary 
touches and an occasional reference to some 
"quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore." 
But I never heard him express an unjust, unkind 
or uncharitable thought respecting any person 
within the circle of his acquaintances. He "had 
no envy of another's fame "and his sleep was 
never disturbed by the "laurels of Miltiades". 
He was quick to appreciate and generous to 
commend the ability and learning of others. 

Although Mr. Baker never married, he was 
fond of society and was never in any sense a 
recluse. He had a keen zest for rambles over 
the hilltops and through the "silent places" of 

1 68 



the woodland near his own home, and for many 
years had passed a portion of the long summer 
days by the resounding sea. The lines of a 
great poet appealed to him : 

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is a rapture on the lonely shore. 
There is society where none intrudes, 
By the deep sea, and music in its roar, 
I love not man the less, but nature more." 

It is sometimes said that the fame of the 
popular orator and of the advocate at the bar, 
however brilliant in their day, is but transitory, 
and that their triumphs soon become a fleeting 
memory and tradition, often passing with the 
generation that witnessed them. But the fame 
of Orville Dewey Baker is secure. No eulogy 
upon his life is required. He erected his own 
enduring monument. The deep impress which 
he made upon our jurisprudence and upon the 
public and professional life of the State, will 
perpetuate his memory to generations beyond 
ours, and cause his name to be inscribed among 
the highest on the roll of Maine's great lawyers, 
powerful advocates and eloquent orators. 



169 



Hon. L. C. Cornish 

I doubt, if ever before in the history of this 
county, the Bar has lost from its ranks within 
the space of a few short months, four prominent 
members, engaged in the active work of their 
profession. Two of the number it has been my 
good fortune to be intimatel)' associated with, 
Brother Baker and Brother Titcomb. Mr. Justice 
Whitehouse has in most fitting and discrimi- 
nating terms spoken of Brother Baker and of the 
exalted place in the profession which he deserv- 
edly won. With all that he has said I most 
cordially concur and to it I would add a single 
personal word. As a student in the office of the 
father, Joseph Baker, and son, Orville D, Baker, 
for one year, associated in work with both for 
three years and then in partnership with the son 
for ten years more, I came to know them thor- 
oughly and to recognize and appreciate the 
strong points of their characters. Keener, more 
logical, more comprehensive legal minds I have 
never met, and for the opportunity and the 
training afforded me by such association I shall 
ever be grateful. At this time it is my plain 
duty to make this recognition although it ma}- 
seem somewhat of a digression from the topic 
assigned me. 

And yet the digression is not so great. The 

170 



career of these two sons when taken in connec- 
tion with the two fathers have run along Hnes 
surprisingly parallel in many respects. Joseph 
Baker was admitted to the Bar and signed his 
name in that little book in the possession of the 
clerk that is a treasure house of names, including 
that of the present Chief Justice of the United 
States, at the August Term, 1839. Samuel 
Titcomb signed only three years later at the 
August Term, 1842. Both ever after made this 
city their home and after long and useful and 
honorable professional careers, died in the har- 
ness, the one in 1883 and the other in 1892. 
Their sons were born within three months of each 
other, the one on December 23, 1847, and the 
other March 14, 1848, attended school together, 
were graduated, the one at Bowdoin and the other 
at Harvard and were admitted to the Bar within 
eighteen months of each other, the one at the 
March Term, 1872 and the other at the August 
Term, 1873. Both ever after made this city 
their home, and after an honorable professional 
career passed away within four months of each 
other, the one at the age of sixty years and eight 
months and the other sixty years and one month. 
The streams of life rarely move in such parallel 
channels. 

Like father, like son, is an old adage, that is 
sometimes though not always true. In these 
two cases the sons did inherit largely in mental 
attributes, in temperament and predilections 
from the fathers, and while Mr. Baker, senior, 

171 



delighted most of all in the combat of actual 
trials and the brilliant display of talent that the 
court room affords, Mr. Titcomb, senior, pre- 
ferred the more quiet lines, the work of the 
office of the probate court and those close and 
confidential relations with clients that exist on 
the part of the counsellor, but not necessarily on 
the part of the attorney at law. The sons 
followed their fathers and stepped into the prac- 
tice and the same kind of practice that the 
elders had built up, and each in his sphere was a 
success and an authority. 



172 



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